April 2022 – Atlantic Path

Funded by the Canadian Cancer Society Data Transformation Grant, this work will connect cancer registry and administrative health data with CanPath data creating a unified resource for cancer research in Canada. https://bit.ly/3OojlZ2 Urquhart R, Awadalla P, Bhatti P, Dummer T, Gravel S, Vena J, Alvi R, Broet P, Kendell C, Kirsh V, Lettre G, Skead K, Sweeney E, Turner D. Harnessing the power of linked data to understand cancer and its outcomes: a national linkage project. March 2022-March 2023, CCS Data Transformation Grant. Canada has a wealth of health care and health research data, but numerous barriers prevent efficient sharing of these datasets between provinces. This, combined with further difficulties with linking datasets together, causes major limitations in using the data productively to improve the health of Canadians. With support from the Canadian Cancer Society, Dr Urquhart will lead a team to connect several cancer registry and administrative health data repositories, creating a unified resource for cancer research in Canada. One of the datasets, CanPath, contains data on 1 in 100 Canadians, including lifestyle, family histories, genetics and environment and this, combined with other datasets, will be analysed to understand the causes of cancer and what happens to people with cancer in the short- and long-term. The researchers will also be able to ask important questions about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on people who have been diagnosed with cancer during this time. Linking these huge datasets will provide a very important resource for cancer research in Canada.

The highly competitive funding is meant to support high-risk, high-reward and interdisciplinary research. The NFRF funding is “especially meaningful because it encourages our scholars to push the boundaries of knowledge. This is how great discoveries are made,” says Alice Aiken, Vice-President, Research and Innovation. “It’s exciting to see our researchers harnessing machine learning, natural language processing and other cutting-edge techniques to reveal new truths that can improve our health and society.” (Source: DalNews, https://bit.ly/3O8Agi7). Using Atlantic PATH data and toenail samples, this funding will allow the research team to expand on their work on arsenic-related cancer and machine learning. Based on Canada’s geology, arsenic represents one of the most prevalent environmental carcinogens linked to skin, bladder, kidney, prostate, lung, breast, and cervical cancer. Half of Canadians are susceptible to develop cancer in their lifetime, with risk modified heavily by genetic susceptibility, behavioural factors and environmental exposure. While cancer risk prevention strategies have extensively focused on physiological and behavioural factors, environmental exposure as a cancer risk has not been well studied which has led to missed opportunities to reduce the risk of cancer through environmental population health programs, such as reducing chronic arsenic exposure by treating contaminated groundwater currently consumed by Canadians. Increased arsenic levels in human toenails have been detected in the Atlantic PATH cohort. Innovative population health interventions, focusing on predicting the susceptibility and type of arsenic induced cancer across Canada are urgently needed to mitigate the increasing prevalence of cancers in Canada. This work will investigate environmental cancer biomarkers and develop innovative data-driven environmental cancer risk assessment tools to help reduce the incidence of cancers caused by arsenic exposure. Please stay tuned for updates from this project!

Month: April 2022

Congratulations to Dr. Robin Urquhart and the CanPath team across the country!

Congratulations to Drs. Syed Sibte Raza Abidi, Jong Sung Kim, Ellen Sweeney, Gabriela Ilie, and Trevor Dummer on a successful New Frontiers in Research Fund’s Exploration grant.