Genome Canada award to help researchers develop personalized medicine software

Toronto, ON – Dr. Lincoln Stein, who is program leader, informatics and bio-computing with the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR), has been awarded $250,000 through Genome Canada’s Bioinformatics and Computational Biology competition, in partnership with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).

Along with his colleague Dr. Guanming Wu, Dr. Stein is planning to develop software that will enable physicians to study and visualize the genomic aberrations of individual cancer patients in order to help identify genes related to cancers and other diseases.

“One of OICR’s research priorities is to use personalized medicine to optimize patient treatment decisions,” said Dr. Tom Hudson, president and scientific director with the OICR. “This project will be of great value to patients because it will link genomic pathway and network patterns to clinical information such as likelihood of cancer metastasis, recurrence, drug sensitivity and patient overall survival.”