Targeting Precision Medicine to Better Prevent and Detect Cancer
Cancer remains the leading cause of death in Canada, largely because the disease is often detected in its later stages. Childhood cancers also shorten lives and diminish quality of life, underscoring the need for better screening, earlier detection and more effective treatment. Dr. Rayjean Hung, Canada Research Chair in Integrative Molecular Epidemiology, aims to better understand why cancer develops and pave the way for early detection to improve patient care and reduce mortality.
She and her research team are characterizing cancer genomics in people of different genetic backgrounds to improve lung cancer risk prediction and understand embryonal tumours (aggressive childhood cancers that most commonly occur in the brain). Hung and her team are also integrating multi-omics data with machine learning to detect lung and pancreatic cancers and validating these tools in real-world screening programs. Their work will deepen our understanding of cancer’s origins while delivering targeted detection strategies that improve equity and outcomes across diverse communities.