My encompasses two major areas. As director of MAPcore at Vancouver Hospital (working with my close colleagues David Huntsman and Blake Gilks) I lead several active tissue microarray and cancer genome profiling projects. A common theme of my work is to make clinical sense out of results from breast cancer and sarcoma basic science investigations, and their translation into diagnostic and predictive tests. As an independent principal investigator, I direct in a research program to develop much-needed systemic treatments for sarcomas, particularly synovial sarcoma (a cancer most commonly occurring in the limbs of young adults), and to develop practical clinical tests for the intrinsic subtyping of breast cancer. We also have active projects in digital image analysis and in epigenomic profiling of cancer.
I have external grant support from the Canadian Cancer Society, the Terry Fox Research Institute, the Cancer Research Society, the Canadian Institutes for Health Research and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
In breast cancer research, I have an active collaboration with Chuck Perou of UNC-Chapel Hill, Matthew Ellis (formerly of Washington University, Baylor College of Medicine and AstraZeneca), and Phil Bernard of the University of Utah, working to translate breast cancer expression profiles into clinical tests using nanoString technology. Indeed, over a decade of dedicated work in this area has resulted in the licensing and regulatory approval of the Prosigna test based on our PAM50 signature, now being marketed by Veracyte. I also direct a research program about the molecular oncology of synovial sarcoma and related cancers of young adults, in collaboration with Michael Underhill of the UBC Biomedical Research Centre, epigenomics expert Martin Hirst and surgeon-scientist Kevin Jones. At UBC, I am part of the Translational Cancer Genomics Cluster, a group of the most active cancer researchers in British Columbia. With BC Cancer, I am part of the Terry Fox Marathon of Hope research team. Here is my .