645- Creating programs to increase the number of patients screened for colorectal
cancer and increase participation in Ontario’s 5-year ColonCancerCheck initia-
tive to establish a colorectal cancer screening program. - Partnering with other Canadian agencies seeking to create a national program to
improve quality of life for young cancer survivors. OICR could help by examin-
ing the long-term effects of cancer drugs.
To promote digitizing and improving interpretation of cancer data, OICR will
promote partnerships between academic teams and Ontario-based companies; stoke
further discussions among cancer researchers, computer scientists, healthcare pro-
viders, and medical IT companies; develop a comprehensive tech platform for stor-
ing, exchanging, and analyzing datasets obtained from human subjects; and provide
grants and other incentives to research groups able to create new algorithms, data
storage solutions, and clinical tools for data visualization interfaces and decision
support tools.
The institute also said it will increase the size and scope of its commercialization
program over the next 5 years, in part by working to attract industry partners and
private investors to companies they and the institute will help create. OICR will also
pursue large-scale collaborations with multinational therapeutics and diagnostics
companies interested in a provincial presence, and create new networks of investors
and business partners, drawing on existing programs like the MaRS Discovery
District in Toronto and Innovation Accelerator Fund, as well as Ontario-based
clinical trials groups.
In the strategic plan, OICR offered 5-year direction for several existing programs
involving the institute. The Cancer Genomics Program, for example, will expand its
scope to a large number of patients and several types of tumors through genomic
studies of tumors collected from other programs, such as High Impact Clinical Trials,
with the goal of developing future personalized medicine strategies for several com-
mon and rare cancers. The Cancer Stem Cell Program will identify new targets for
discovery of specifi c anti-CSC agents designed to eradicate the stem cells of various
tumors. Initiatives over the next 5 years, according to OICR, will allow it to use and
further develop its technology platforms – imaging pipeline, transformative pathol-
ogy, genome technologies, medicinal chemistry, and informatics and biocomputing.
OICR is also conducting a cancer tumor resequencing and analysis project that
seeks to serve as a framework for how sequencing may be used in the clinic to develop
tailored cancer therapies (Dancey et al. 2012 ). The study is based in part on sequenc-
ing that currently is being conducted by the International Cancer Genome Consortium,
which has shown that some mutations associated with one type of cancer, such as the
BRAF mutation, have been observed in other types of cancer. The publication covers
a number of the issues related to use of genome sequencing in cancer trials, including
tissue requirements, patient recruitment and informed consent, data sharing, and the
implications of such projects and data on drug development, regulatory agencies,
patients, providers, and others. It offers proposals and shares practices based on les-
sons OICR researchers have learned in trying to incorporate sequencing in cancer
care and clinical trials. Findings of this study suggest that cancer diagnosis should
Global Scope of Personalized Medicine