Ovarian Cancer

In the summer of 2017, at the age of 36, Registered Nurse Allison Kelly was living a full and active life. It wasn’t until she had completed a strenuous back-country hike that she started to notice a pain in her leg. Chalking it up to nothing more than...

Every three and a half hours, another woman is diagnosed with ovarian cancer in Canada. In B.C, more than 300 women will be diagnosed with a form of ovarian cancer this year.

In the winter of 2014, this statistic included West Vancouver’s Candy Woodworth.

At her weekly Pilates class, Candy noticed she felt uncomfortable when doing a routine exercise. She went back to...

Much of the progress we have been able to achieve to date within the Ovarian Cancer Research (OVCARE) program has been possible thanks to our many partnerships.

Indeed, mentioned in my first blog, the nature of OVCARE as a multi-disciplinary, multi-institution research group makes partnership inherent to our success. In fact, our partnerships extend beyond the medical and scientific...

In my previous post I mentioned the BC Cancer Agency’s OVCARE team and the great work they’ve done to position themselves as one of the world’s leading ovarian cancer research teams. They’re not only conquering cancer in the lab, but they’re also doing it on two wheels.

With its many supporters, OVCARE has participated every year in The Ride to Conquer Cancer, and is one of the top...

Philanthropy and research is truly a partnership. We can have a lab full of talented and passionate researchers, but if we don’t have the dollars to fund the research, then the leading-edge discoveries that the BC Cancer Agency has become renowned for wouldn’t happen. There are lots of examples, but I will highlight one—OVCARE—BC’s Ovarian Cancer Research Program.

Traditionally,...

Hello everyone, my name is Miruna Bala and I am very happy for the opportunity to blog this month.

I am the Quality Systems group leader for the Holt Lab at the Genome Sciences Centre and the immunotherapy program at the BC Cancer Agency, which means I am responsible for the design, implementation, monitoring and improvement of the Quality Management System (QMS). QMS ensures accurate,...

Hello, I’m Katy Milne and I am a Research Assistant at the Deeley Research Centre (DRC). I started working here in 2003 when the DRC was just starting up – things have really changed over the past 12 years!

Like most, I have known too many people with cancer. Because I’ve always found the human body fascinating, immunotherapy was a perfect fit for me - I think of it as our way of giving...

Hello everyone, my name is Dr. John Webb and I’m the senior project leader for the upcoming immunotherapy clinical trials at the BC Cancer Agency.

As project leader, I will direct the manufacturing of T cells for immunotherapy clinical trials – this includes designing, overseeing and implementing immunotherapy for use with patients in the clinic.

My interest in cancer research...

Today, I’d like to share three major things that B.C.’s OVCARE team has contributed in the last decade:

1) TAKING STEPS TOWARD PERSONALIZED MEDICINE: A woman diagnosed with ovarian cancer today will be managed according to the SPECIFIC type of cancer she has. This may mean she can be spared toxic therapies that may not help her, or receive better therapies with higher success. (Message...

In this final week of May, I’d like to shift away from endometrial cancer and share some ovarian cancer team discoveries from OVCARE.

Thanks to the work of my colleagues Drs. Blake Gilks, Martin Kobel, David Huntsman and others—work that was done before I joined the BC Cancer Agency—we learned...