Eight pan-Canadian research teams receive newly created TFRI-MOHCCN Technology Development Awards

Eight outstanding research teams from across the country will receive a total of $2.2M from the Terry Fox Research Institute (TFRI) and the Marathon of Hope Cancer Centres Network (MOHCCN) to develop, validate, standardize and deploy new technologies that can help accelerate precision medicine for cancer.

Funded through the newly established TFRI-MOHCCN Technology Development Awards, these teams will be working to assess which technologies can efficiently be adopted in centres across Canada to enrich the data currently being generated for the MOHCCN Gold Cohort, which is on track to be Canada’s largest and most complete cancer case resource.

“The Gold Cohort already includes genomic, transcriptomic and clinical data, making it an extremely useful resource for researchers seeking to unlock discoveries to help cancer patients,” says Dr. Jim Woodgett, TFRI President and Scientific Director. “These projects will help us to identify which new technologies are ready to supplement our current data uniformly across the Network, making this a vital investment in the future of cancer research in Canada.”

“We are delighted to support these teams and the groundbreaking work they are doing to develop and deploy new profiling technologies for the benefit of cancer patients in Canada,” says Dr. André Veillette, MOHCCN executive director. “By supporting these projects, we are not only helping to make our dataset more scientifically valuable, but we are also making a significant investment in Canadian innovation, helping to position us as global leaders in precision oncology now and into the future.”

The eight winning projects are:

• A collaborative approach to characterizing tumour immune microenvironments with multiplex immunofluorescence, led by Drs. Amber Simpson (Queen’s University) and Lillian Siu (Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University Health Network)
• A modular platform for harmonized, multiplex immune profiling of MOHCCN Gold Cohorts across Canadian institutions, led by Drs. Jeanette Boudreau (Dalhousie University) and Brad Nelson (BC Cancer - Victoria)
• Implementing a pan-Canadian standardized mass spectrometry-based proteomics approach for the analysis of clinical cancer samples: Validation using archived breast cancer specimens for biomarker discovery, led by Drs. Paola Marcato (Dalhousie University), Gregg Morin (BC Cancer), Karama Asleh (Dalhousie University), Christopher Hughes (Dalhousie University) and Samuel Aparicio (BC Cancer)
• Metabolomics standardization process, led by Dr. Anne-Marie Mes-Masson (CRCHUM)
• Deciphering heterogeneity of rare metaplastic breast carcinoma Gold Cohort through spatialomics, led by Dr. Morag Park (McGill University/Rosalind and Morris Goodman Cancer Institute)
• Plasma whole-genome sequencing in pancreatic and biliary cancers, led by Drs. Erica Tsang (University Health Network)
• Orthogonal pangenome sequencing to unveil genetic cancer susceptibility diagnostic odysseys: A Return of Results Working Group new technology assessment study, led by Dr. George Zogopoulos (Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre/Rosalind and Morris Goodman Cancer Institute)
• Cell-free whole genome and epigenome sequencing to detect and classify cancers from plasma circulating DNA, led by Drs. Trevor Pugh (Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University Health Network) and Samuel Aparicio (BC Cancer Research Institute)

About the awards

The TFRI-MOHCCN Technology Development Awards are a Special Initiative funding opportunity supported by the Terry Fox Research Institute and the Marathon of Hope Cancer Centres Network. These awards provide funding to projects to develop additional profiling technologies that would generate data compatible with precision oncology and could be applied to a section of the MOHCCN Gold Cohort.