From CEO Sarah Roth: Unlocking the Future of Cancer Care

Article was originally published in Vancouver Sun on February 4, 2025. 

Sarah Roth, president and CEO, BC Cancer Foundation

We are living in one of the most exciting eras of cancer research and care. For the first time, scientists are more hopeful than ever that cancer can become a manageable disease within the next decade. Personalized oncology holds the key to this future, but due to its complexity, it comes at a cost.

On World Cancer Day, beyond the statistics, we are reminded that every cancer patient is a person — a mother, a sister, a husband, or a friend — and their care must reflect that. Together, we can invest in precision medicine and innovative diagnostic tools to ensure targeted treatments are available to everyone facing this disease.

For decades, cancer treatment relied on a standard protocol of surgery, chemotherapy and/or radiation or a combination of all three. While essential, these treatments often lacked precision, rendering them blunt instruments against a disease that has mastered adaptation and survival. Harsh, debilitating side effects and long recoveries were often inevitable.

As our understanding of cancer has evolved, so too has the promise of personalized oncology — treatment tailored to each person’s unique cancer, down to its DNA. This precision spares healthy tissue while targeting disease with extraordinary accuracy, minimizing toxicity and improving patients’ quality of life.

BC Cancer has made significant strides in this area and we are already witnessing the impact on patient care. Radiation can now be targeted to within millimetres, while genomics and molecular biology allow doctors to understand a patient’s cancer at a cellular level. By analyzing genetic mutations and biomarkers, oncologists can select treatments more likely to target each individual’s cancer.

The importance of these advances cannot be overstated. Last year, more than 34,000 British Columbians were newly diagnosed with cancer. Making up these diagnoses are more than 200 distinct cancer types, each with varying subtypes that behave differently in individual patients.

BC Cancer researchers achieved a world first when they classified breast cancer into 10 distinct subtypes. This groundbreaking discovery has led to a deeper understanding of breast cancer risk. With donor funding, BC Cancer’s Hereditary Cancer Program has implemented genetic testing for breast cancer patients under 60, helping to identify BRCA gene mutations, which increase cancer risk by up to 70 per cent.

Backed by BC Cancer Foundation support, Dr. Sam Aparicio and his team conducted pioneering research on triple negative breast cancer (TNBC), a particularly aggressive subtype often found in younger women. Preliminary findings revealed that whole genome sequencing is up to 100 times more sensitive than alternative approaches, allowing for earlier relapse detection — sometimes up to two years before it occurs. This early detection is critical for timely and targeted interventions, potentially saving lives.

Another example of personalized oncology’s impact is Dante Di Pasquale, a metastatic prostate cancer patient who benefitted from a BC Cancer Foundation-funded circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) clinical trial. This trial studies the unique properties of cancer using only a blood sample, offering insights that traditional methods could not. Dante’s results revealed a mutation that responds well to immunotherapy — a leading-edge therapy that harnesses the patient’s immune system to attack cancer cells. For many prostate cancer patients, this therapy is ineffective, but thanks to this trial, Dante received life-saving treatment. Today, four years later, he is thriving.

With BC Cancer Foundation donor support, a Next Generation PET/CT arrives at BC Cancer – Vancouver this year. This transformative technology reduces scan times from 40 minutes to just two minutes, increasing capacity to treat more patients and supporting further precision medicine research.

BC Cancer’s senior executive director of research, Dr. François Bénard, says, “It’s not something I thought I would see in my career. When I started, it took 90 minutes to scan one patient.”

Francois and his team are particularly excited about the Next Generation PET/CT’s potential to advance theranostics, a groundbreaking approach that uses one radioactive drug to detect cancer and another to deliver treatment — enabling the optimal dose needed to treat a patient’s cancer while protecting healthy tissue.

These leaps and bounds are just the beginning. With four new BC Cancer centres on the way, bringing the provincial total to 10, patients in B.C. will benefit from donor-driven innovation in treatment, technology and research closer to home.

Without philanthropy, all this progress in understanding, treating and preventing cancer would be unimaginable; researchers would face severe limitations in resources, hindering their ability to pursue bold, high-risk ideas that revolutionize cancer care, leaving patients with fewer treatment options.

To fully conquer the greatest health challenge of our time, we must come together and invest even further in the future of personalized oncology. We owe it to the one in two people we love, who will face cancer one day, to ensure they receive the individualized, cutting-edge cancer care they deserve.