This Time, It's Personal

Each year, 11 million people across the world are diagnosed with cancer, and 7 million people succumb to this dreadful disease. Despite years of intensive research, cancer remains a complex and formidable foe.

The Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) was launched at an inflection point in cancer genomics, with the advent of large-scale analyses of genes in tumors revealing that the mutation load in cancer is highly abundant. With advances in massively parallel sequencing technology, whole cancer genome sequencing has started. As part of an alliance with international funding agencies in Asia, Australia, Europe, and the United States, OICR cofounded the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC). The ICGC is designed to identify cancer-causing mutations involved in more than 25,000 tumors from over 50 types of cancer. OICR’s role in the ICGC includes...