Philanthropy and Research

I’ve been lucky in my career to be part of research that has resulted in major advances in the treatment of prostate cancer.

When I first started as an oncologist, there was only one treatment for advanced, hormone therapy resistant prostate cancer – it was a chemotherapy called mitoxantrone, which although well tolerated, only produced a modest improvement in symptoms with no survival...

Key to doing cancer research is funding (i.e. money!). As researchers, we spend a lot of time trying to get funding from various sources, particularly granting agencies. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – by subjecting our ideas to repeated scrutiny, it helps us to refine our research plans and make sure that the best projects go forward. The problem is that there are lots of good ideas and...

The BC Cancer Agency’s Tumour Tissue Repository (TTR) is another example of a biobank that owes much of its success to generous donations to the BC Cancer Foundation. The TTR provides support for PREDICT to operate and collect blood samples and focuses on collecting cancer tissue specimens after surgical and medical procedures. The TTR has created a standardized collection of over 4,500 tissue...

This week I would like to talk about biobanks and tell you a little more about how they work.

Biobanks operate by coordinating a process to approach patients to ask them to give their consent to access their tissues and health information. Tissues are removed in the course of medical procedures to diagnose and treat cancer and a portion of these tissues are often left over after...

Time has flown and this is already my last post. I want to take the opportunity to look into the future and explain with a little more detail the new directions I see for the research field, the Centre for Lymphoid Cancer and my own laboratory.

In the last decade, we have generated an exciting wealth of data for lymphoid cancer, describing changes on the molecular level. From this, we...

As I alluded to last week, I’d like to tell you about a very exciting project in my laboratory and why it is so critical to have you as donors and the BC Cancer Foundation as partners as we strive to solve the mystery of cancer.

You can think about research funding support as a mix of two components: the first component is constant and projectable research formulated up to seven years...

Hi everyone! I’d like to take this opportunity to talk about how donations to the BC Cancer Foundation support research work at the BC Cancer Agency, where I serve as the Medical Director for the Screening Mammography Program .

While most of you are familiar...

Without embellishment, BrainCare has managed to create a brain tumour diagnosis/surgery/treatment paradigm that I believe is unique in the world.  Perhaps this is simply due to the luck of timing, but as they say, the harder you work, the luckier you get.

There are three foundations:

Firstly, the BC Cancer Agency has a world-class Functional Imaging Program. Under the supervision...

Much of my research at the BC Cancer Agency would not exist without the philanthropy of our donors. Lung cancer research has traditionally been underfunded in comparison to many other tumour types. We have been incredibly fortunate to be generously supported by the Eleni Skalbania Endowment for Lung Cancer Research which has been instrumental in allowing us to examine the care of lung cancer...

Canadian society is made up of many immigrants. Currently, South Asians of Indian descent are the largest group of immigrants and many reside in the Fraser Valley region. Like many immigrant populations, the South Asian community has unique needs when it comes to accessing medical services.

Our Breast Research to Evaluate Access and Services (BREAST) team has taken an in-depth look at...