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Personalized Medicine at Ontario Institute for Cancer Research
In 2010, the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) announced that it will
expand efforts to translate its research over the next 5 years, in part through a greater
focus on personalized medicine and building partnerships with industry and other
research institutions, according to its Strategic Plan 2010–2015 ( http://www.oicr.
on.ca/ ). OICR will join with partners in academia, industry, healthcare organiza-
tions, and government on four priorities it identifi ed for its translation effort: (1)
adopting more of a personalized medicine approach toward fi ghting cancer; (2)
developing solutions to clinical issues that could benefi t patients in the next 5 years;
(3) digitizing and improving interpretation of cancer data; and (4) accelerating
OICR’s Patents to Products Program, which encourages Ontario-based companies
to develop, use, and commercialize products based on the institute’s research. The
institute will also work to generate commercialization opportunities within the
Canadian province through a new partnership it has formed with the Ontario
Medical Advisory Secretariat (MAS), a division of the Ministry of Health and
Long-Term Care (MoHLTC); and Cancer Care Ontario, the provincial agency over-
seeing cancer services, including the nearly C$700 million ($692 million) public
healthcare dollars to cancer care providers.
The initial goals of OICR are to establish prognostic and predictive genetic tests
in cancers that guide the proper and effective use of cancer therapies. The program
will monitor effi cacy and produce full economic analyses. Over time, other modali-
ties of personalized medicine will be dealt with. Its partnership with CCO and
MoHLTC will focus on molecular tests used to guide the use of targeted therapies,
such as the Her2 test for trastuzumab and K-RAS mutation testing for EGFR inhib-
itors. The tests will also help the partners decide if characteristics of tumors warrant
more conventional cancer treatment, the report stated. The partnership may evolve
to enable mechanisms that would measure the effects of treatments at earlier stages,
and/or allow treatment optimization of targeted therapies at all stages (prior, dur-
ing, or after). The partnership will build support for startups focusing on develop-
ing personalized medicine products – including pharmacogenomics, target
identifi cation/drug development, diagnostic, and imaging – and work with regula-
tory agencies to streamline reviews for new therapies and diagnostic and prognos-
tic tests. OICR also committed itself to addressing fi ve clinical challenges over the
next 5 years:
- Identifying targets and new therapies through its large-scale genomic analyses of
pancreatic cancer. - Discovering urine, serum, imaging, and pathological biomarkers that predict
prostate cancer, with the goal of preventing over-diagnosis of patients. OICR
will team up with Prostate Cancer Canada and Cancer Research UK to generate
comprehensive genome datasets from indolent and aggressive tumors, from
which new candidate biomarkers would be identifi ed. - Developing imaging and pathological biomarkers that predict the risk of breast
cancer.
20 Development of Personalized Medicine