The Terry Fox Research Institute’s Ontario Dialogue: How Will Personalized Medicine Change Health Care?

This is the final instalment in a series of three articles by the Terry Fox Research Institute about its pan-Canadian dialogue series, Cancer: Let’s Get Personal, a public research and outreach project undertaken in 2010. The dialogues served to launch a national and continuing conversation on personalized medicine with the medical and scientific communities and the public, including cancer survivors, patients, and caregivers. Participants at the Ontario dialogue, held in Toronto, October 18, 2010, discussed the challenges that Canadians and the health care system face as they move forward on a pathway created by advanced science and technology that will phenomenally transform cancer care and treatment. The one-size-fits-all approach to treating cancer patients is being rapidly eclipsed by an approach that treats patients and their tumours as individually as possible. As a result, a paradigm shift is occurring both in the laboratory and in the clinic, creating new approaches to conducting research and delivering treatment and care that place each and every patient—and tumour—at the centre of treatment. New approaches and practices in health care are necessary to ensure successful uptake and implementation of these advances for the benefit of all Canadians. Participating partners and supporters of the Ontario dialogue were the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research and the University Health Network.