
Congratulations to Dr. David Lim, Medical Director at the Henrietta Banting Breast Centre at Women’s College Hospital, who was awarded a 2024 Precision Oncology Research Grant from Breast Cancer Canada. The $75,000 grant will be used to fund his research into identifying a prognostic gene signature for invasive lobular breast carcinoma.
“I am grateful to receive this funding from Breast Cancer Canada in support of our research on lobular breast cancer. Lobular breast cancer is the second most common histological subtype of breast cancer but is understudied and has worse survival than the more common ductal subtype. Despite the worse survival, lobular breast cancer is treated the same as ductal breast cancer, and so lobular breast cancer is in need of more research to identify personalized treatment strategies,” says Dr. Lim.
Breast Cancer Canada, a national charity dedicated to saving lives through breast cancer research, announced a series of initiatives to support the progress of breast cancer research. Precision Oncology Research Grant’s selected projects will focus on precision oncology, advancing traditional breast cancer screening and therapeutics into the era of personalized medicine. These initiatives will span four dimensions of precision oncology research: basic science, screening and detection, personalized treatment and diagnostic tests, and patient-reported outcomes.
“For this funded research, we will leverage our collaboration with a pre-existing pan-Canadian multicentre breast cancer research network to recruit patients with lobular breast cancer. We will be collecting specimens from their tumour that is resected at surgery and sent to Women’s College Hospital for biobanking,” adds Dr. Lim. “Our researchers will be able to perform whole genome sequencing of the tumours, with the goal of discovering new gene signatures that may better predict recurrence and outcomes than the tests currently used clinically.”
Previous recipients include Dr. Joanne Kotsopoulos, scientist at Women’s College Hospital Research and Innovation Institute for research into long-term outcomes of BRCA1 and Dr. Mohammad Reza Akbari, scientist at Women’s College Hospital Research and Innovation Institute for research into young-onset patients with ER+/HER2-.