Changing Lives through Research

The Canadian Cancer Society has funded research for a long time because we believe it's so important in the fight against cancer. We have really great scientists in this country. They do excellent research. We wanted to encourage people who were perhaps outside the mainstream cancer community, to come in and bring new perspectives bring new technologies, bring new methodologies. We started a program called Innovation Grants. The idea is to bring out of the box ideas into the cancer research system and see what kind of impact we can have. Ideas that challenge conventional thinking that will stimulate new research directions that can be built on. We ask scientists from around the world to come and read through the grants and they make recommendations to us about which ones they think are truly deserving our funding. We are interested in modeling pancreatic cancer in a culture dish. A tool for us to really understand how pancreatic cancer begins. That has never been done before and I think the field is going to benefit "big time" from doing this. This is an exciting time for cancer research. Now we know that lung cancer is not one disease. The drugs are now designed to target many of the abnormalities that cancer has. We would like to prevent more cases of cancer developing in the first place. Prevention is very essential. The only way that our research is really going to have an impact is if we're able to advocate for important changes in prevention programs and policies. There's a huge opportunity now to inform Canadians about their risks. We are doing our best to help make the healthy choice the easy choice. We've been funding the clinical trials group based out of Queen's University in Kingston. When we learn things in a petri dish we need to keep applying them. The people doing the research. The doctors and nurses from across our network, ultimately are the same people who deliver treatments down the road. We have a great group of women volunteering for various research studies, and it is really their altruistic spirit that helps the clinical research. It's the the element of surprise and the freedom to ask very interesting questions. We don't know where the breakthroughs are going to come from. The only way that we are ultimately going to conquer cancer is through research.