Treating Cancer
As researchers, we dream of the opportunity to have access to new technology that has the potential to make a huge difference in treating cancer. Not only does the hybrid MRI — linear accelerator machine first designed right here in ¾ÅÐãÖ±²¥ allow us to clearly see and treat more types of soft-tissue tumours, but we can confidently increase the radiation dose because the tumours are so much more visible. That means we can reduce the number of treatment sessions down to five, possibly — when as many as 39 sessions might have been necessary 15 years ago.
Dr. Nawaid Usmani, CRINA member since 2014
Professor, Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry
Ideal cancer treatments target tumours directly and leave healthy tissue untouched. Increasingly, treatments are also becoming more tailored to the unique aspects of each patient’s individual cancer, genetics and biology for maximum benefit. This personalized, or precision approach to treatment can include harnessing the patient’s immune system to better fight cancer, and using genetic and molecular information to find the best drugs with the fewest side effects for each patient.
Here’s how we’re doing it
- Developing groundbreaking systems to guide more targeted radiation therapy
- Reducing radiation toxicity
- Using viruses as agents to destroy tumours
- Better prediction of whether a cancer patient will respond to a particular treatment
- Investigating novel nanoparticles for drug delivery
- Designing gene-based drugs to fight breast cancer and leukemia
- Creating computer-based protocols to enable synthesis of drugs
- Offering clinical trials to expedite treatment development and speed access for patients
- Harnessing the immune system to fight cancer
