Genomics

My name is Intan Schrader and I am co-medical director of the Hereditary Cancer Program with Sophie Sun. I am a medical geneticist, specializing in cancer genetics.  

It was during medical school that I took a serious interest in cancer genetics. After receiving my medical degree from the University of Melbourne, I completed my residency in Medical Genetics at the University of...

Waiting for the elevators at the BC Cancer Agency Research Centre, I see the plaque commemorating the Jambor-McCarthy gift to the BC Cancer Foundation. It includes their family motto: work hard, live well, give back. I’ve adopted this for my own mission statement, and try to exemplify these in my work at the BC Cancer Agency.  

Every day, I work hard to provide...

Over the past 13 years at the Genome Sciences Centre, I have led the development of teams of professional leaders, managers and coordinators, with the overall goal of enabling the best possible science and research and the maximally effective use of available resources.

To maintain our vision and focus amidst the noise that research administration can sometimes involve, we have a...

Like most people, I’m sure; I had no idea when I finished school what I would be doing today. I’ve been fortunate to find opportunities to learn and contribute to science and research for many years now.

When I came to Vancouver from Winnipeg in 1990, I worked for nearly 10 years in the field of environmental assessment, before moving into research, specifically the field of genomics....

I’m delighted to be this month’s blogger for the BC Cancer Foundation. Over the next month, I hope to share with a bit about myself and my enthusiasm and commitment to the incredible research work being done at the BC Cancer Agency.

Currently, I’m the Director of Management and Administration at the BC Cancer Agency Genome Sciences Centre, where I’ve been a project manager since 2003...

Last week I blogged about what led me to study blood cancers and how they come about. This week, I will update you on some our previous work, and the work that is currently being supported by the BC Cancer Foundation.

A number of years ago, my lab became very interested in learning about a kind of blood cancer called myelodysplastic syndromes, or MDS. This cancer starts out slowly, but...

My path to a career in science and medicine was convoluted, but not without direction. I grew up in east Africa on an island in the Indian Ocean. Both my maternal grandparents died at very young ages of undiagnosed conditions. While the setting was idyllic, the reason for my grandparents’ deaths, or rather the lack of a reason bothered me.

This great gap in understanding—the causes of...

Cancer is a complex disease, and so cancer research is by necessity multifaceted and involves lots of collaboration. We are fortunate in B.C. to have strong research programs.

We do need to pay attention to research and programs in health promotion, cancer prevention, and early detection through screening as these can have profound effects on our overall goal of reducing the burden and...

As Head of Bioinformatics at the Genome Sciences Centre, my role is to oversee the computational analysis of the DNA sequence data that we are generating. While sequencing technologies can now rapidly produce copious amounts of raw DNA sequence, computational challenges remain.

Currently, we have over nine petabytes of disk space – that’s nine million gigabytes, or the equivalent space...

During the tail end of my PhD in Cambridge, I was contacted by Dr Michael Smith from the University of British Columbia. He explained he was interested in visiting the Sanger Institute, in the UK. Obviously, I was fully aware of the famous Dr Smith—British Columbia's home grown Nobel Prize winner.

Although, to this day, I am not one hundred percent...