My encompasses two major areas. As director of MAPcore at Vancouver Hospital (working with my close colleagues David Huntsman and Julia Naso) I lead several active tissue microarray, cancer imaging and genome profiling projects. A common theme of my work is to make clinical sense out of results from sarcoma and breast cancer foundational science investigations, with a goal of translation into diagnostic and predictive tests, and improved patient care. As an independent principal investigator, I direct in a research program to develop much-needed systemic treatments for sarcomas, particularly synovial sarcoma and desmoplastic small round cell tumor (cancers most commonly occurring in young adults), and to develop practical clinical tests for the intrinsic subtyping of breast cancer. We also have active projects in tenosynovial giant cell tumor, microscopic digital image analysis and in epigenomic profiling of cancer.
I hold competitive external grant support from the Canadian Cancer Society, the Terry Fox Research Institute and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research as well as important philanthropic support from some amazing and generous people in the sarcoma advocacy community (managed through the BC Cancer Foundation).
In breast cancer research, I have an ongoing collaboration with Chuck Perou of UNC-Chapel Hill, Matthew Ellis (formerly of Baylor College of Medicine, now at Guardant Health), and Phil Bernard (University of Utah), working to translate breast cancer expression profiles into clinical tests. Indeed, over a decade of dedicated work in this area has resulted in multinational regulatory approvals for the Prosigna test based on our PAM50 signature -- licensed to Veracyte, who have made this test available worldwide to guide breast cancer care. In sarcomas, David Huntsman and I co-lead a multi-investigator team studying the Origins and Progression of Childhood, Adolescent and Young Adult Sarcomas, funded as a major Program Project by the Terry Fox Research Institute. In collaboration with epigenomics expert Martin Hirst, I am also part of the national Terry Fox Marathon of Hope research program, in our case focussing on generating datasets researchers around the world could use to develop precision oncology tools for sarcomas. Here is my .