Leukemia

Hello again. In my last post, I told you a little about my background and how I came to be at the BC Cancer Agency. The journey from graduating medical school to becoming a Clinician-Scientist involved over a decade of training, gaining the skills and experience to both care for patients and perform research.

The role I now have at the BC Cancer Agency, in the Centre for Lymphoid...

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...

Science tends not to be a series of “eureka” moments but rather, if one is lucky, the odd eureka interspersed with a lot of hard slogging.

In the mid ‘90s my group made the rather startling discovery that we could stimulate the expansion of blood-forming stem cells by engineering the overexpression of a single gene. By 2002 we had advanced...

As my close family has, unfortunately, been affected by cancer, I can relate to that feeling of urgency and desire to accelerate research and better understand cancer. As a family member, I want to know that more effective and less toxic treatments are on the horizon. As a researcher, I want to discover the same thing. This means learning how cancers exert their effect and finding the changes...