Dr. Rebecca Gladdy appointed Clinical Investigator in Selective Therapies Program
Dr. Rebecca Gladdy
Dr. Rebecca Gladdy, a Canadian-trained surgeon-scientist who is hoping to improve treatments for soft-tissue sarcomas, has been recruited to the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) Selective Therapies Program.
Although progress has been made in recent years in the management of sarcoma, the tumour type that Terry Fox did not survive, there is still significant work to do to improve functional and long-term patient outcomes. Gladdy and her colleagues at Mount Sinai Hospital (MSH) in Toronto, which houses Canada’s dedicated Sarcoma Program in the conjunction with OICR Selective Therapies Program, are hoping to change this situation in the near future by discovering new therapeutic targets for treatment. Last year, the Terry Fox Foundation got on board when it announced OICR’s Selective Therapies Program, led by Dr. Robert Rottapel, would be the Ontario node for its new cross-Canada “virtual” research institute.
The collaborative spirit and opportunity to work with world leaders in cancer biology, genomics and in the Sarcoma Program at Princess Margaret Hospital and MSH all helped attract Gladdy back to Ontario. Over the next several years their work will span from basic laboratory research to clinical trials involving patients in Ontario. Specifically, they are attempting to identify therapeutic agents through the use of high-throughput screens; to develop novel mouse models as a tool to determine which genes are critical for sarcoma formation, and thus should be targeted in pre-clinical drug testing; and to take the knowledge gained from the laboratory into patient care as quickly as possible.
Before she relocated to Toronto this summer, Gladdy was a fellow in Surgical Oncology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. She previously completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute in Toronto and her General Surgery Residency at the University of Toronto. She holds a PhD in Biomedical Science from the University of Toronto and a medical degree from Queen’s University in Kingston.
