The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids)
Canada's largest children's hospital, where brain tumour stem cells were first isolated and where the Li-Fraumeni surveillance protocol was developed.
SickKids is Canada's largest paediatric hospital and a University of Toronto teaching site whose Garron Family Cancer Centre and Research Institute have an outsized record in paediatric oncology. Peter Dirks first isolated cancer stem cells from human brain tumours in 2003-04; Michael Taylor (now at Texas Children's) defined the four molecular subgroups of medulloblastoma; Cynthia Hawkins's group characterised H3K27M diffuse midline glioma. David Malkin and Uri Tabori developed the 'Toronto protocol' of whole-body MRI surveillance for Li-Fraumeni syndrome, now adopted internationally, and Tabori's international consortium showed hypermutant, replication-repair-deficient childhood cancers respond to checkpoint inhibitors. SickKids is a major Children's Oncology Group site with programmes in leukaemia, neuroblastoma and sarcoma.
- Brain tumour research
- Cancer predisposition and surveillance
- Paediatric leukaemia and solid tumours