Network names 10 early-career data scientists as recipients of its 2024 Health Informatics & Data Science Awards

Ten promising, early-career scientists have been named recipients of the 2024 Health Informatics & Data Science Awards funded by the Marathon of Hope Cancer Centres Network (MOHCCN). Each will receive $40,000 from the Network over the next year to be matched by their host institutions for a total of $80,000 to support groundbreaking research in precision oncology.

This new injection of funding totaling $800,000 will support the creation and use of new computing technologies to analyze data with the goal of improving diagnostics and therapies for patients with multiple cancer types. Winning researchers are based in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Nova Scotia.

“Finding new ways to analyze big data from cancer patients is key to accelerating precision medicine in cancer,” says Dr. André Veillette, Network executive director. “These awards not only support the development of groundbreaking techniques and technologies to do this, but also provide an investment in a diverse group of up-and-coming professionals in this field, helping to position Canada as a leader in precision oncology now and in the future.”

 “As someone who has directly benefited from cancer research and a precision medicine approach to cancer therapy, I applaud this investment in young researchers and new technologies,” says Debbie Duclos, a registered nurse and member of the MOHCCN Patient Working Group from Campbellville, ON, who was diagnosed with locally advanced breast cancer in 2015. “These investments will enable new discoveries while also supporting the development of these early-career professionals, bringing new hope to current and future cancer patients.”  

The award recipients and their project titles are:

• Yuanchang Fang (University Health Network), for: Plasma Whole-genome Sequencing to Detect and Characterize Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma
• David Henault (University Health Network), for: MULTi-modal Integration in Pancreas cancer using machine Learning (MULTIPL): Personalized predictions of outcomes across the spectrum of disease and treatments
• Ali Khajegili Mirabadi (The University of British Columbia), for: Unsupervised Histopathology Search Engine for Diagnosis of Primary and Metastatic Cancers
• Julia Nguyen (University Health Network), for: Evaluation of Synthetic Lethality in Guiding Cancer Therapeutics
• Jorge Pinzón-Mejía (Dalhousie University), for: Defining the Genomic and Immunologic Landscape of Colorectal Cancer  
• Caralyn Reisle (BC Cancer), for: Using Natural Language Processing to Generate Text Summaries of Genomic Findings in Precision Oncology
• Hyojin Song (University of Calgary), for: Predicting response to immune checkpoint blockades in high-grade soft tissue sarcomas
• Xin Kevin Wang (University Health Network), for: HistoGx: Histomic integration with multi-omic data for massively scalable precision oncology
• Xindi Zhang (Ontario Institute for Cancer Research), for: DeepTumour: Enhancing an Advanced Algorithm for Tumour Origin Identification
• Andrew John Garven (Queen’s University) for: Decoding Epithelial Plasticity: Exploring the Influence of SWI-SNF Complex Mutations on Bladder Cancer Progression

Top row: Julia Nguyen, Yuancheng Fang, David Henault, Ali Khajegili Mirabadi, Xindi Zhang. Bottom Row: Jorge Pinzón-Mejía, Xin Kevin Wang, Hyojin Song, Caralyn Reisle, Andrew Garven.

About the Health Informatics & Data Scientist Awards

The Health Informatics & Data Scientist Awards provide outstanding young researchers in health informatics and related fields with funding to support high-quality research in precision oncology. The award is designed to support young researchers as they complete their studies and develop their careers, in close collaboration and mentorship with established MOHCCN funded teams. Researchers currently enrolled in graduate (Master and Ph.D.) and post-doctoral studies in the fields of health informatics, data analytics, data science, computational biology, bioinformatics, and related fields at Canadian institutions were invited to apply.   

Awardees will use the funds to support clinically related research using MOHCCN data, providing information that may form the basis of innovative cancer prevention, diagnosis and/or treatment.