Four early-career MOHCCN Clinician-Scientist Award holders focus on accelerating precision medicine for patients with gynecologic, blood, breast and head and neck cancers

Four promising, early-career clinician-scientists have been named recipients of the 2023 Clinician-Scientist Awards funded by the Marathon of Hope Cancer Centres Network (MOHCCN). Each will receive $225,000 over the next three years to be matched by their host institutions for a total of $450,000 to support groundbreaking research in precision oncology. 

This new injection of funding totaling $1.8M will support research for gynecologic, head and neck, blood and breast cancers, with three of the projects based in Quebec and one in Ontario.

“We are delighted to support these outstanding clinician-scientists and the important work they are doing in the clinic and the lab to accelerate precision medicine for cancer patients,” says Dr. André Veillette, MOHCCN executive director. “Our goal as a Network is to help position Canada as a world-leader in precision oncology and, with investments like this, also build our capacity at health and research centres across the country to help accelerate precision medicine for the benefit of patients.”

The award recipients and their project titles are:

• Dr. Houda Bahig, Centre de Recherche du Centre hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal (Montreal) for: Artificial intelligence to predicting efficacy of drugs and radiation in head and neck cancer through radiology imaging and digital pathology combined to tumour genomics  
• Dr. Long Viet Nguyen, University Health Network (Toronto): Predicting drug response of molecular clones in triple-negative breast cancer
• Dr. Natasha Szuber, Hôpital Maisonneuve-Rosemont (Montreal): Defining the genomic landscape of high-risk hyperproliferative phenotypes in polycythemia vera: A precision medicine-based approach
• Dr. Basile Tessier-Cloutier, Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (Montreal): Clinicopathologic and molecular characterization informs large-scale therapeutic screening of SWI/SNF-deficient gynecologic malignancies

Pictured from left to right: Dr. Basile Tessier-Cloutier, Dr. Natasha Szuber, Dr. Houda Bahig and Dr. Long Viet Nguyen

About the award

The MOHCCN Clinician-Scientist Award provides outstanding early-career clinician-scientists with funding to support high-quality research in precision oncology. The award is designed to support early-career investigators as they develop their careers as independent clinician-scientists, in close collaboration and mentorship with established MOHCCN-funded teams.

In addition to new funding, the researchers will have access to expertise, data and resources generated by the Network. In turn, they will contribute knowledge from their projects to the Network, helping to accelerate the implementation of precision medicine for cancer in Canada.