Message from the Director
Director, CDCR
Professor of Surgery and Biochemistry, McMaster University
Pediatric Neurosurgeon, Hamilton Health Sciences
Cancer is the leading cause of death in Canada. Nearly one in two Canadians will develop cancer in their lifetime, and approximately one in four will die from the disease.
The team at the Centre for Discovery in Cancer Research (CDCR) at McMaster University is working to change these statistics by developing new and improved ways to diagnose, treat, and manage people with cancer.
McMaster and Hamilton have many strong cancer experts working in clinical settings and laboratories across the city, as well as in collaborations across Canada and around the globe. The CDCR brings these scientists together to provide a 360-degree research agenda that addresses questions in the lab, clinic, and community to provide a holistic research program of global impact.
We are especially focused on building expertise around treatment-resistant cancers, such as glioblastoma, triple-negative breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, treatment-refractory lung cancer, brain metastases, and advanced ovarian cancer, among others.
We are proud of the team we’ve assembled at the CDCR and are optimistic about the impact of our research, both today and tomorrow. We encourage researchers and students working in the fight against cancer to join our team, and welcome support from the community to help fund our work.
Together, we can make a difference.
Are you interested in learning more about the CDCR?
Mandate and Mission
Mandate
The mandate of the centre will be to apply the use of human disease models, and undertake comprehensive translational and reverse-translational studies that inform the rational development of combinatorial therapies for cancer treatment.
The basis of our mandate is founded on the following tenets:
- Complex cancers require complex therapeutic strategies that are data-driven and rationally designed, based on experimental interrogation and new scientific discovery.
- Cross-disciplinary research will be encouraged as multiple biotechnological tools and platforms will need to be engineered to deconvolute complex and treatment-refractory cancers.
- Highly collaborative programs will be promoted, and training of next-generation scientists in a communal, open-concept research environment will be prioritized.
- Tailoring of molecular and multi-omic integrative data from human cancers (informed by next-generation bioinformaticians), and development of diagnostic and therapeutic tools using patient-based and AI driven algorithms (informed by data science) will lead to rapid translation of discoveries into patients with integrated clinical trial design (informed by clinical trialists and oncologists with clinical trial design expertise).
Mission
The Centre for Discovery in Cancer Research (CDCR) at McMaster University develops programmatic collaboration and synergy between scientists and clinicians across the city of Hamilton through multi-disciplinary working groups that will be empirically established around each full member scientist, around cancer subtypes and disease models.
The centre will build expertise around treatment-resistant cancers of high unmet need, such as glioblastoma, pancreatic cancer, triple-negative breast cancer, treatment-refractory lung cancer, brain metastases, advanced ovarian cancer, and others.
Members
McMaster and Hamilton have many strong cancer experts working in clinical settings and laboratories across the city, as well as in collaborations across Canada and around the globe. The CDCR brings these scientists together to provide a 360-degree research agenda that addresses questions in the lab, clinic, and community to provide a holistic research program of global impact.
Information Box Group
Tobias Berg
MD, PhD
Director, Translational Oncology Program
Katie Houlahan
PhD
Principal Investigator
Anthony Rullo
PhD
Director, Training
Associates
Information Box Group
James Inkster
Associate Member
Chemistry and Chemical Biology
Jian-Qiang Lu
Associate Member
Pathology & Molecular Medicine
Jakob Magolan
Associate Member
Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences
James McNulty
Associate Member
Chemistry & Chemical Biology
Saman (Sam) Sadeghi
Associate Member
Chemistry & Chemical Biology
Jenna Smith-Turchyn
Associate Member
Rehabilitation Science
Jonathan Stokes
Associate Member
Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences
Ryan Wylie
Associate Member
Chemistry & Chemical Biology
Boyang Zhang
Associate Member
Chemical Engineering
