Research is Making a Difference
62 percent of Canadians diagnosed with cancer survive. Donor funding has contributed to groundbreaking results around treatments and outcomes.
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If you’d been diagnosed with cancer in the 1940s, you’d have had about a one-in-four chance of surviving. Today, according to Christine Williams, vice-president of research for the Canadian Cancer Society, chances of survival are better than 60 percent overall, with even better odds with certain types of cancer — including breast (more than 88 percent) and some pediatric forms (more than 80 percent). The reason for those dramatically improved statistics: advances in research and how they’ve been applied to medicine.
“When we talk about the history of how cancer treatment has changed, originally we were just trying to hit the side of the barn door,” explains Williams. “Now, rather than hitting the side of the barn door, we’re trying to find the lock and pick the lock.”
While basic cancer treatment techniques — surgery, chemotherapy, radiation — haven’t changed much since the middle of the 20th century, researchers have fine-tuned the way they are used. “The more we understand about the molecular characterization of cancer, the more treatment has changed, so the right patients are getting the right treatment at the right time,” says Williams. “It’s more effective, with fewer side effects, better quality of life and better outcomes.”
A significant portion of funds raised by the Canadian Cancer Society goes toward research that can have groundbreaking results. One of the many notable examples is a trial reported in 2005 of patients who’d had lung cancer surgically removed. As Dr. Ralph Meyer, head of the National Cancer Institute of Canada Clinical Trials Group, explains, doctors know that ultimately some of those patients would have a recurrence and die from the cancer.
Researchers led a trial that compared surgery alone — the standard of care at the time — with surgery followed by chemotherapy. The survival increase was in the range of 10 to 12 percent — “striking,” as Meyer says. As a result, the treatment protocol was adopted, and outcomes have since improved.
The Canadian Cancer Society Research Institute has launched new funding programs, including Innovation and Impact grants. The more substantial Impact grants are awarded to research that has already demonstrated great potential for impact, says Dr. Brian Wilson, researcher and head of the Society’s Advisory Committee on Research, “and to try to accelerate it so you could get to the point where the new knowledge could start to be used.” The two-year term.
Innovation grants are designed “to identify truly innovative, out-of-the-box ideas which are as yet largely untested but which could lead to more detailed research, which hopefully would end up with significant impact.”
A perfect example is a 2012 Innovation Grant awarded to Dr. Paula Foster, who is employing leading-edge MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) technology to study metastasis — one of the biggest challenges in cancer treatment and research. In fact, most cancer deaths are not caused by an initial tumour, but by its spread to other parts of the body.
Dr. Foster and her team, based at the University of Western Ontario in London, are using powerful MRI tools and techniques that are able to detect and follow a single cell. The goal is to study the movement of immune cells to healthy tissue (the “pre-metastatic niche”) that a spreading cancer seems to have targeted, and to monitor any resulting changes in the tissue. This creative approach of looking at where cancer cells are going, rather than simply studying the initial tumour, could change our current understanding of the metastatisis process and may lead to therapies that prevent or treat metastasis by targeting the metastasis site tissue.
Grants are open to scientists new to cancer research as well as to established investigators doing work across the full spectrum, from prevention and biomedical work to survivor research. “You don’t know where solutions are going to come from,” says Wilson. “There’s lots of science going on and lots of possibilities.” Application is a longer process: letters of interest from researchers are peer-reviewed and those that are short-listed are sent for full proposal, then ultimately reviewed by panels of experts. “Nothing gets funded if it’s not scientifically excellent,” he adds. “That’s a sine qua non.”
The Society has an international reputation for the quality of its peer review process. “We do this really well,” says Wilson, “in part because the scientific community expects us to, and in part because we are spending funds that have been donated for the purpose of cancer research. We want to make sure we spend it in the best possible way.”
The astounding advances already made have ensured there is less to fear now than ever before. But, as everyone who has been touched by cancer knows, there are still miles to go and a million questions to be answered. Research remains as important as ever. As Williams says, “We can’t detect, treat or prevent what we don’t understand.”
View previous articles:
The Fearless Project: Changing the Conversation
Changing Cancer Forever Begins Here
How Advances in Cancer Research Changed a Family's Life
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