The Terry Fox Research Institute has announced the launch of a new Canadian Prostate Cancer Biomarker Network funded by The Terry Fox Foundation and The Canadian Partnership Against Cancer. The new network brings together scientists and clinicians at leading cancer care and research centres across Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia to conduct research on novel and more effective biomarkers. This group will work to find new ways to earlier differentiate between aggressive and benign disease.
Dr. Laurence Klotz, a urological oncologist and scientist at Sunnybrook who specializes in prostate cancer care and research, is a participating investigator.
For the Canadian Prostate Cancer Biomarker Network's studies, Dr. Klotz and his lab team will develop a tissue microarray from a cohort of patients of the Sunnybrook active surveillance program, the most mature program of its kind in the world. These patients are considered stable with 10 to 15 years of follow-up with no required treatment. The tissue microarray based on this cohort will form a control group for these biomarker studies to help look for aggressive disease.
Tissue microarrays can house up to 1,000 separate tissue cores taken from tumour samples, or in this case from clinical biopsies. These tissue cores are assembled in an array format to allow for multiplex histological (pathology) analysis.