Ontario Innovation Agenda

Transcript - Ontario’s Innovation Agenda: Direct Engagement

Tom Hudson
President and Scientific Director,
Ontario Institute for Cancer Research

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I’d like to say from my perspective that innovation is easy, innovation is everywhere.  In fact I think ideas are gushing out of the ground, here in Ontario and across the world.  It’s having an impact - innovation having impact − which is difficult.  It’s difficult, sometimes people don’t know what the right problem is; they’re innovating but it may not have a big impact, but really the issue is actually bringing these innovators together because no one has the whole solution for the problem.  Bringing them resources: they have to have a common vision and need to collaborate. 

The OICR which was launched a few years ago, it actually was created by MRI; was created to actually bring the best of the cancer research community together in Ontario.  Consult, work, partner with the international community around important areas such as prevention, early detection of cancer, therapeutics, and I’ll just give you an example of a project we called “The Millimetre Cancer Challenge” where we have many innovators, of course, the problem here is identifying cancer while it is still very small.  Most of the time when we find cancer it’s big, and there are hundreds of millions of cancer cells in the body, and the fire is in the house, it’s very late.  We’d like to find cancer when it’s very small, when physicians, surgeons and other methods are very effective at treating cancer – so millimetre-sized cancer.  What do you need? 

You need oncologists, you need pathologists, and you need the biologists which can find a protein specific to a cancer cell but not the other cells.  You need a chemist which can actually take that protein and find a compound that binds to it.  You need someone, another type of chemist, which labels it in a way that an imaging device like a PET scan, an MRI scan can actually detect that protein, and if you have many of these proteins you can start saying, “hey, this looks like a tumour” when it’s still very small.  Then you need people to commercialize.  Imaging probes is what we developed in this millimetre cancer challenge.  It’s like ink is to a printer; the printers are everywhere and HP makes money by selling the ink.  In this case of imaging probes, the PET scans, MRI scanners are in labs across the world.  What we want to sell is the ink; it’s these imaging probes which are used by clinicians and radiologists to actually find the tumours when they are actually very small.  So the challenge of the OICR was to bring these teams together.  People innovating each of these steps along the pipeline, so that we can actually have an impact, and I do hope we have projects in breast cancer, prostate cancer, many types of tumours are actually being looked at differently, but all the same vision of identifying small tumours. 

The other big project which I know people are starting to recognize us for, is for this international cancer genome consortium.  Cancer is a global problem.  We know that there are many mutations, thousands of mutations when we look at a cancer cell.  The DNA in cancer is not the DNA you inherited from your parents, and we know that if we can actually target one of these changes sometimes it puts patients in remission, and the best drugs that have come out for cancer in the last decade have all been things targeting specific cancer cells.  These are not chemotherapies. 

To find those mutations, we need genome project.  Not a genome project like we did in 2001.  I was at MIT for eleven years so I’ve been involved in this for a long time.  We need to resequence, thousands, tens of thousands of cancer because unfortunately everybody with breast cancer doesn’t have the same mutations, and everybody across all the different cancers don’t have the same mutations.  Some are recurrent, some drive cancer, but in three percent of patients, five percent of patients, we need large numbers.  New technologies are there, about 100,000 times faster to sequence the genome than it was five years ago.  We sequence at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research the equivalent of 60,000 billion bases of DNA sequence a week, which used to take us 200 machines, 200 people at MIT five years ago, and now it’s done by a team of five/six people and ten machines. 

So things are changing, it’s evolving but even if we decide to do this project, it’s not sufficient.  We’re looking at pancreatic cancer.  There are many types.  We partnered; we’ve actually been asked to be a secretariat in the data coordination centre for this international consortium.  We have labs in: Japan, China, India, France, U.K., European Union, U.S.  All the ten major funding agencies, each commit $20 million or more to actually look at one tumour type, and we’re actually building this compendium, this atlas of information for the public, for the scientific community through a large partner program, and with the resources at the OICR we have been able to (one) get some of the world leaders and these types of informatics.  These types of technologies, but also work with pathologists and lead one of these projects but also participate, leading this international effort.  So for us MRI has been a catalyst.  It has been a catalyst for giving us resources, the ability to build this plan, bring people which just didn’t exist in Ontario so we have strong clusters but sometimes we have gaps. 

I found recruiting to Ontario has been very easy; we’ve been trying for years.  I’ve always been in the recruitment business for different themes, but actually bringing some world leaders has been quite a spectacular success, and I think it’s again a shared vision of many people saying, “Let’s go there: OICR, MaRS.  Actually, a wonderful place to actually put ideas, and the reason we come is we want to have an impact, and we think it will happen here.” 

Thanks.