Premier Christy Clark has announced the additional funding for the B.C. Cancer Foundation’s ‘highly experimental’ program.John Lehmann/The Globe and Mail
Jennifer Strack had been through five rounds of chemotherapy and was forced to drop out of a drug trial after her body refused to handle the strong doses. The tumours riddling both of the non-smoker's lungs stubbornly refused to go into remission.
But she stopped coughing soon after entering a program a year ago in which oncologists sequenced the genetic code of her tumour, allowing them to tailor a therapy specific to the elevated protein they found. She was given a lung cancer drug that "they never normally would have given to me," Ms. Strack said.
After she started taking one pill daily, a chest X-ray showed that a tumour on her left lung had shrunk considerably.
On Tuesday, the B.C. government pledged $3-million to the program, which helps those with tough-to-treat cancers by sequencing the genetic makeup of individual tumours to pinpoint the most effective drug treatments.
Since 2012, the BC Cancer Agency's Personalized Onco-Genomics program has conducted clinical trials with 350 patients and decoded the genetic sequencing of 50 different types of cancers. With this new funding, about 2,000 more patients will be treated over the next two years, and there are plans to help thousands more in the coming five years, agency oncologist Janessa Laskin said.
The agency estimates that 300,000 people in British Columbia will be diagnosed with new cases of cancer over the next decade.
To be eligible for the highly selective program, patients must have an incurable cancer that is spreading to other parts of their body.
They must also have undergone a small amount of chemotherapy, live in B.C. and be willing to undergo experimental treatment.Under the program, each person's case is discussed for about 15 to 20 minutes by a group of physicians and oncologists, as well as genome scientists who have mapped out the genome of the biopsied tumour, Dr. Laskin said. Knowing the tumour's genetic code gives the group more information to devise the best treatment option using any available drugs, she added.
She likened traditional cancer diagnoses to the parable of six blind men and an elephant.
"One has a hold of the trunk, one has a hold of the tail and one has the leg. ... Each one is convinced they know what an elephant looks like because of the piece that they're holding," she said after Tuesday's news conference at the agency. Under the new approach, "we look at the whole elephant."
"We don't have blindfolds on. The elephant is huge and complicated, and it's scary, but at least we're seeing all of it."
Doctors with the agency said the treatments are a first for cancer care, but the long-term outcomes are unknown. Dr. Laskin said the results of each patient's personalized clinical trial will help doctors better understand the technology and apply what they learn to treat more cases.
Premier Christy Clark and Health Minister Terry Lake joined Ms. Strack and a team of doctors from the agency for Tuesday's announcement.
Ms. Clark said someone's genomic map is like a big novel, packed with dense information.
"Doctors can go through that 50,000-page novel and find one error on page 3,000," she said. "Not only can they find it, but they can fix it without eradicating other genes around it."
Meanwhile, Malcolm Moore, the cancer agency's new president, said he has spent a lot of time in his first four months on the job travelling around the province and meeting people working in different cancer centres and regional health authorities. He left Toronto's Princess Margaret Cancer Centre last year to steer an organization that has fought internal dysfunction and seen its previous two presidents serve less than four years combined.
"This is a very complex system and there's a lot of moving parts," Dr. Moore said. "What we've committed to is a plan to reorganize the way the agency functions to kind of position it for the future."
He said he is writing a policy paper for the government, and the reorganization should be announced by the end of next month.
Wynne Powell, chair of the Provincial Health Services Authority board that oversees the cancer agency, said that timeline is "probably a little ambitious, but it's good to have people that are ambitious and throw out those goals."
"What we asked Dr. Moore to do when he joined us was to review the whole way that we're delivering cancer care," said Mr. Powell, adding he was very pleased with the new president's performance so far.
With a report from The Canadian Press