Top Canadian Research Stories of 2015: Teaching an old dog new tricks

Every day cancer scientists around the globe make progress in our understanding of the basis of cancer, how to prevent the disease, and how to treat the disease.  Canada plays an important part in this progress. 

The Canadian Cancer Society recently released its top Canadian Cancer Society funded research stories of 2015.  The projects range from new tools to study cancer, new understanding of biological basis disease to new tools to diagnose and treat cancer to quality of life issues for cancer patients. Check out all their stories here!

All of the 10 stories are amazing and intriguing.  But today I will highlight one from our own backyard at the NCIC Cancer Clinical Trials Group in Kingston, Ontario.

As a scientist, I think of cancer research in terms of novel treatments and improving patient survival.  But there’s another area of cancer research that physicians and cancer patients care a lot about: cancer pain.  As a patient, having to undergo radical therapy and alter your lifestyle is hard enough.  Understanding pain associated with cancer and managing symptoms is just as an essential component of cancer research.

Canadian Cancer Research Conference 2015

Several weeks ago now, close to 1000 cancer researchers – scientists, clinicians, mathematicians, investors, and public health officials – from across Canada came together at the Canadian Cancer Research Conference (link) in Montreal, QC, to discuss our insights, successes, questions, and our hopes for cancer research.  Although the disciplines are diverse, we share one common goal: to better prevent, detect, and treat cancer.

This is the third time such a conference has been held in Canada and the second time that I have attended.  Because of the breadth of disciplines attending the event, the wealth of information and the topics are varied and very rarely lend to boredom. 

Although the science can be detailed, and the big ideas mind-bending, there were several moments that struck me in their importance.  For brevity, I will just list them and let you ponder them.  Hopefully, over the next several months, we can delve deeper into these ideas.

Bra-wearing and Breast Cancer Risk: When research supports me.

If you follow enough media news, you might become overly discouraged: everything causes cancer.  The food you eat, the air your breathe, the environment you live in, the clothes you wear.  Everything.  Although some of these claims may be grounded in science, the media has a tendency to extend the truth.  For example, awhile back I read an Internet posting about how wearing bras may cause breast cancer.  I shook my head is disbelief and continued wearing a bra.  And then recently, I came across this journal article, Bra wearing not associated with breast cancer risk”, refuting the claim.  I was intrigued and slightly amused.

New trick for an old hat: Extranuclear Cyclin D1

Research that blows our mind.

In one of the most highly cited papers from July 2014, researchers from the departments of Cancer Biology and the Kimmel Cancer Center at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia describe a new function in a new location with a novel interaction for the cell cycle protein cyclin D1.  

Such a discovery can shake your world just a little bit.  It’s like seeing your supervisor, the highly intelligent yet quiet and reserved enigma of a man, at your favourite coffee shop.  Wait, my boss leaves his office?  And he works here too, just like me?  Your mind is blown and getting coffee there is never the same.

And so it is with cyclin D1. 

Shifting our mindset back to the basics.

As this is a forum for learning and discovery, I wanted to stay away from any form of writing that might come across as a rant.  But perhaps you will permit me, this one time, to go off on a slight tangent.  Some of this article has appeared in Queen’s Health Science Journal, volume 13, 2013.

I was inspired but a recent editorial by Bob MacDonald, a well-known, well-liked Canadian science journalist who works for the Canadian Broadcast Corporation.  In his editorial (check it out here), he argues for increased funding for the basic sciences.  The trend across many countries involves funneling research dollars away from basic research to those projects most likely to have direct impact on its citizens and/or on economic growth.  Quite frankly, this trend is short-sited.  As MacDonald writes, “To focus only on applied sciences is to limit future possibilities”¹. 

Cancer Avatars for Personalized Medicine

They’re not blue and they’re not science fiction.  They are avatars, at least of the cancer kind.  From the hands of Dr. Sandeep Pingle, MD PhD from Moore’s Cancer Center in UC San Diego, CA comes computer representations of tumor cells.  Defined as an icon or figure representing a person, avatar is an appropriate term to describe the computer simulation modeling the genomic signatures of individual cancers and how they will respond to specific therapeutic interventions. 

In light of the recent discussions on how each tumor is unique and the need for personalized medicine, this newest discovery provides a tool for a comprehensive analysis of individual cancers.  Most importantly, it can be customized for each patient, allowing clinicians to treat patients selectively with drugs believed to have the greatest chance of success.

Thoughts so far . . .

Let’s recalibrate:

At the start of this blog, I had a clear goal: to share breaking cancer research in a manner that is easy to understand.  Who knew – it’s harder than it might seem!  The intricacies of cancer combined with the complicated technical jargon and methods make this task somewhat difficult, particularly if the goal is to break down the science into meaningful pieces of information without taking away from the science.

And so, I find that the beginnings of this blog has become more educational and perhaps more useful for entry-level students hoping to break into the cancer research field.  This information is still valuable for the general public and those merely curious about cancer and cancer research, but for them, it might take some slugging to get through the articles.

And so, I’m dividing this blog into two parts: one is basic informational posts about techniques or topics relevant to cancer, without focusing on newly published research; the other part will highlight new cancer research in a more newsy manner.  The former will be similar to what’s already been discussed, with more explanations and introductions to key players in the cancer field.  The latter section aims to highlight major findings without going into all the details.  My perspective on these topics can still be found in the “Where do we go from here” section.  You'll know by the title (Educational vs Research) where today's topic falls.

The combination of these two parts will hopefully give you, my readers, the information necessary to critical evaluate the science for yourself and to see the progress being made in the cancer research field.

This new direction is a challenge: a challenge for me to write in a clear, concise, and truthful manner; and a challenge to my readers to keep reading.  More than that, ask questions.  What do you want to know about?  Is a term or concept not understood? Do you disagree with my perspective?  With that, we can be assured we are in this endeavor together.