Dr. Daniel Renouf: My Journey to the BC Cancer Agency

Hello everyone,

I’m Dan Renouf, a medical oncologist and clinical researcher at the BC Cancer Agency. The areas I focus on include the treatment of pancreatic cancer, and the development of new therapies to treat cancer.

In this first blog post I want to start by telling you a bit about myself: I grew up in Edmonton and did my medical school training at the University of Alberta—I’m still a big Edmonton Oilers fan! I then came to Vancouver for my residency training in internal medicine and medical oncology. I became quite interested in the areas of pancreatic cancer and development of new drugs, and so I went on to Princess Margaret Hospital for a couple of years to work with some experts in the field.

I was very lucky to work with international experts in these areas who were also excellent mentors for me. I was also happy to return to the BC Cancer Agency after my training, as the Agency is a world leader in cancer treatment and research and has an amazing team of scientists and clinicians. They are great to work with and since being back I’ve had the opportunity to get involved with innovative projects.

One area we’re especially excited about is the Pancreatic Cancer Research Initiative, a partnership between the clinicians and researchers at the BC Cancer Agency and the expert surgical and pathology teams at Vancouver General Hospital whose goal is to change the course of diagnosis, treatment, and survivorship for patients across Canada.

I’ll get into more details of this in the coming blog posts, but we believe that we have the potential to be one of the top pancreatic cancer research centres in the world. The BC Cancer Foundation’s Inspiration Gala is happening tonight with proceeds going to support pancreatic cancer research, so this will be a very exciting week as we kick-start this important initiative!

Dan