Researchers Under the Scope

As a pediatric neurologist, Dr. Richard Huntsman sees the children with the most medically complex epilepsy

"It completely disrupts the life of a family," said Huntsman. "Limitations on what the child can do, limitations on what the family can do."

"When the kids have really severe and difficult-to-control epilepsy, It's a huge burden on their parents."

Eight years ago, parents started asking Huntsman about whether they could try treating their childrens' seizures -- with cannabis.

Back then, Canadian health officials allowed doctors to prescribe the medical use of dried marijuana buds -- which meant smoking them.

"No pediatrician would recommend that for a child," said Huntsman, who said any therapeutic benefits and dosages for cannabis products at the time amounted to a big question mark.

"I was maybe a little bit skeptical that we would see huge improvements," Huntsman said.

As an associate professor of pediatric neurology in the College of Medicine, Huntsman knew CBD and THC contain anticonvulsants.

He wanted high-quality, independent data, so he designed an investigator-sponsored study to test cannabis on epileptic children.

"I certainly did raise eyebrows when I went to the different funding agencies," he said, crediting his department, the Saskatchewan Health Research Foundation, and the Jim Pattison Children's Hospital Foundation for their financial backing.

"That took a lot of courage."

Huntsman and his team approached Saskatoon-area licenced producer CanniMed, Canada's first licenced producer of medical marijuana, to create a food-grade CBD oil for children with a targeted ingredient list.

"We knew exactly what was in it with regards to concentrations of cannabidiol, THC, and to a lesser degree other cannabinoids which are present in these compounds," Huntsman said.

He then recruited 20 Canadian children with drug-resistant, medically severe epilepsy started by recording their baseline seizure frequency. Eleven of them attended monthly appointments in Saskatoon, to participate in the study.

Parents turned in detailed medical journals each visit, including changes they observed in their child and in their family's quality of life.

The CBD oil worked.

"The reduction in seizure frequency was around 60 per cent." said Huntsman, calling the findings 'really significant'.

Although not all children responded the same way, Huntsman was even more surprised to see a number of children become entirely seizure-free by the end of the study.

"These were kids who'd tried multiple multiple medications, had tried ketogenic diets, had tried things like steroids, etc to control their seizures."

In this episode, we hear how those patients are doing today, and why one young boy's case became a true 'aha' moment for Huntsman.

"He was interacting more, he was laughing at funny bits of movies, which he'd never done before." said Huntsman.

Huntsman founded the Cannabinoid Research Initiative of Saskatchewan, hoping to join forces with other biomedical researchers to learn more about CBD and THC, and whether they're more effective in combinations or alone.

In this episode, we also hear where Huntsman wants to see more research, with hundreds of cannabinoids and potential compounds to explore.

Researchers in Robert Laprairie's laboratory are hard to miss, wearing tie-dyed lab coats as they oversee mice and lab rats in iPad-sized chambers filled with cannabis smoke.

An associate professor in the College of Pharmacy and Nutrition, Dr. Laprairie and his team are trying to unravel the mysteries of human neurotransmitters and cannabinoid receptors, and their role in neurodegenerative disease.

"Cannabis is challenging. There's a lot of bureaucracy, there's a lot of stuff that gets in the way. So there was a knowledge gap," said Laprairie.

Still, Laprairie never thought of himself as a career scientist, and initially enrolled as an Education student.

Midway through his studies, he took on a part-time job tending canola seedlings for Agriculture Canada — a job that made him re-think his plans, as he learned more about treating disease in plants.

After switching majors and completing his honours degree in biochemistry, Laprairie arrived at Dalhousie to complete his graduate studies, studying how to 'turn up the volume' on damaged cannabinoid receptors in patients with Huntington's disease, and certain forms of epilepsy.

"I wanted to focus more on the pharmacology. How does the CB1 [cannabinoid receptor type 1] as a receptor work?" said Laprairie.

Patients with Huntington's disease often lose up to half of their functioning cannabinoid receptors without ever knowing it.

It's not easy to see that slow degradation happening, Laprairie said.

"In animal studies we've seen the animals tend to be more anxious when the [CB1] receptors stopped. They tend to be somewhat spastic and their movements," said Laprairie. "Their movements can be a little bit less coordinated and they seem to exhibit some of the symptoms of depression."

Today, Laprairie holds a Canadian Institutes of Health Research chair in Drug Discovery and Development. He and his team are trying to create positive alasteric modulators (PAMs) — drugs that boost, or turn up the volume on a patient's remaining CB1 receptors — without the intoxicating effects associated with marjuana.

In this episode, we also hear why communication -- and finding the right mentor -- is crucial for biomedical researchers and scientists with young families.

Laprairie jokes that he fathered one child as he completed each degree -- and with three young children, his early career became hectic.

"There's just a lot of strain that puts on a family. Communication and scheduling became essential for survival," he said.

Crediting Dr. Eileen Denovan-Wright, an 'amazing' supervisor with helping him through his master's and doctoral work, Laprairie describes biomedical research as 'a team sport'

"Her support of me and her acknowledgement and understanding made all the difference in the world. I would not have been successful without that support," Laprairie said.

In 2016, Laprairie was the top pick in the CIHR's fellowship program, and he accepted a post-doctoral fellowship at The Scripps Research Institute in Florida.

Upon his return to Saskatoon, Laprairie went on to work with Dr. Richard Huntsman using cannabidiol, which appeared to reduce the frequency of childhood epileptic seizures when administered orally.

"Patients that were tested here at the University of Saskatchewan saw about a 50% drop in seizure activity," said Laprairie.

"For someone who is experiencing a lot of seizures that are otherwise untreatable, that's huge."

Laprairie says the pharmacology of hallucinogenic drugs including psilocybin mushrooms and LSD are an area he plans to explore in the future.

He believes some hallucinogens could serve as potential anti-depressants, among other therapeutic uses.

"There are a lot of unanswered questions there," Laprairie said.

Dr. Ivar Mendez is one of the world's leading experts in neuroscience and robotics, neuromodulation, and remote medicine.

But nine years ago, the award-winning neuroscientist who founded Dalhousie's Brain Repair Centre faced a career dilemma.

Would he accept a senior clinician's position at Harvard University, or would he move to Saskatchewan, to oversee surgery for an entire province?

Today, Dr. Ivar Mendez says he's glad he chose Saskatoon.

"It's been a privilege for me to work with remote communities in Saskatchewan," said Dr. Mendez, provincial head of surgery and a clinical neurosurgeon with the University of Saskatchewan and the Saskatchewan Health Authority.

This spring, he published Sariri, a book of essays about his travels to remote communities in Bolivia.

He said there are 'commonalities' between Indigenous people in both Bolivia and northern Saskatchewan, in terms of their relationship with the earth and its teachings.

"They have a lot of knowledge and healing that we in Western medicine are not using, but it's very valuable," Mendez said.

Mendez has made it his mission to bring 'remote presence' robots into nursing stations in 17 fly-in and remote communities across northern Saskatchewan.

In this episode, hear why being able to practice virtual medicine paid off during the Covid-19 pandemic, as lockdowns isolated Saskatchewan's poorest, most remote citizens.

In 2021, midway through the pandemic, Dr. Mendez took unpaid leave and returned to Bolivia where the coronavirus was ripping through hospitals, killing hundreds of health care workers and thousands of Bolivian citizens.

"There were no ICU beds, no beds at all," said Mendez. "Hundreds of thousands of people were dying."

After he arrived, Dr. Mendez sent countless families personal protective equipment, Bluetooth-equipped medical devices, and he set up real-time consultations with phsyicians so they could monitor sick patients at home.

"They were able to save many lives," said Mendez, noting a 'significantly lower' mortality rate for patients whose family members cared for them at home, compared to those admitted to hospital.

In this episode, Dr. Mendez also describes a recent trip to Ethiopia, where prenatal care for rural women was nearly non-existent, until teams from Saskatchewan tried giving midwives portable ultrasound kits.

With supervision from obstetricians in urban centres, 17 Ethiopian midwives became 'expert sonographers' offering free pre-natal scans on market Saturdays.

Some women walked for more than ten hours, for their first chance to see their baby.

"When I went back to Ethiopia a couple of weeks ago, they'd done 3,800 ultrasounds -- more than ten times what we ever thought," said Mendez.

"They wanted to know if their babies were healthy."

In this episode, hear more about Mendez' initial fascination with the human brain, his push to bring stem cell transplants to patients with brain injuries and disease, and why he cares deeply about bringing health care to impoverished communities.

Using 'doc in a box' virtual medicine, clinicians can 'see' patients in 17 remote communities in northern Saskatchewan including La Loche, Pelican Narrows, and Stony Rapids.

"We have built the most comprehensive remote presence robotic program in Canada, and one of the most advanced in the world," he said. "

Mendez predicts virtual care, robotics and artificial intelligence will 'revolutionize' health care.

"It will disrupt the way we practice medicine and I think we will be better, for the way we're using them," he said.

From insects and birds, to the underwater world, Juan Ianowski's fascination with the natural world began early.

As a biologist, he was drawn to physiological processes, later scrutinizing the kidneys of insects, whose epithelial cells behave in similar ways to those in human lungs.

By 2015, Ianowski's research was focused on the pathophysiology of lung cells, and the nerve channels controlling them. He and his collaborators were working with the Canadian Light Source, to get a more accurate picture of the tiny cells involved.

But Ianowski had a nagging feeling he was missing the bigger picture.

"I had a very large gap in my life," said Ianowski. "I had never seen a patient."

That summer, he fired off an e-mail to Dr. Julian Tam, who'd just moved into a new position as the director of Saskatchewan's adult Cystic Fibrosis clinic.

They agreed to go for coffee.

Tam already knew Saskatoon, after spending his residency in internal medicine here, followed by a fellowship in Respirology.

"I liked that I could reason out, based on various principles, how things worked in our lungs," said Tam. "There were a few patients that I looked after with CF fairly early on in my training, and I think they really left a mark on me."

When they met, Tam found Ianowski's work interesting, but saw 'a bit of a disconnect' between the research and his day-to-day practice.

Within months, the respirologist asked Ianowski to shadow him during patient visits.

Most CF patients take dozens of pills each day, as well inhaling nebulized saline solutions designed to loosen mucous, and reduce infections.

"It can be very time-consuming and we would love for their treatments to be as efficacious as possible," said Tam.

To figure out how, and why the saline solution worked — and what could make it more potent, Tam and Ianowski became collaborators on numerous projects supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Information, the Saskatchewan Health Research Foundation, and Cystic Fibrosis Canada.

With the help of colleagues at the Canadian Light Source and the Canadian Centre for Health and Safety in Agriculture, they started finding answers by doing mass spectrometry in real time, in a herd of pigs genetically modified to carry the gene for Cystic Fibrosis.

"This is pretty hard because the amount of fluid that we are looking for is very small. So it's about the width of a human hair," said Ianowski.

That work led to numerous publications, and to the University of Saskatchewan's application for a patent for a better inhaled treatment to treat CF lung disease.

Now, Tam and Ianowski also looking at gastrointestinal disease in CF patients, and TRIKAFTA — an innovative class of drugs that's effective for most — but not all — people with the disease.

Today, they're testing those drugs in the lab to gain a detailed understanding of the effects they produce. A recent CIHR grant will help them better understand the basic epithelia of the lungs. They're also looking for ways to better treat CF patients who cannot tolerate TRIKAFTA treatments.

"Our hope is that some of our work gives us a better understanding of the disease process," said Tam, as he and Ianowski aim for better treatments, by figuring out which lung cells to target, and where.

Dr. Deborah Anderson has spent her career as a biochemist and cancer cell biologist pinning down elusive targets.

Now she's made a breakthrough in one of the world's most swift-moving and aggressive cancers: triple negative breast cancer.

This form of the disease affects 15 to 20 per cent of women diagnosed with breast cancer. It's , and is often more prevalent in young women, with a disproportionate number of Black and Latina women. Unlike other forms of breast cancer, it's not fuelled by the hormones estrogen and progesterone, or by the HER2 protein — and so does not respond to typical hormonal therapies

For Anderson, Director of Research at the Saskatchewan Cancer Agency, unraveling biochemical mysteries has always been a passion.

During her third year as a pre-med student at the University of Manitoba, she switched to an honours biochemistry program.

"I got to learn more about things like the fundamental processes going on in cells, controlling cell functions, cell behaviour, and this just reinforced my interest and love of science and I was hooked," said Anderson.

After completing her doctoral studies, she went on to work in laboratory of the late Tony Pawson — a scientist Nature magazine calls 'one of the most extraordinarily gifted and celebrated molecular and cellular biologists of our time.'

"We were just starting to learn how to make controlled, known mutations, to sort of probe what those different mutations would do to the protein that they were in," said Anderson.

"Now you can sequence the whole genome — 20,000 genes and more in a day for a thousand dollars. So the technology has definitely changed what we can do and how fast we can do it."

Over the past decade, Anderson and her research team have looked at CREB3L1, a protein that sits on a person's DNA and helps decide whether or not to switch on the genes that stop cancer from spreading.

CREB3L1 is missing inside metastatic cancer cells, leading Anderson to question which proteins are active there instead.

"This is a common thing in cancer where things that put on the brakes are often missing," Anderson said.

She and a team of six researchers have now identified a protein that promotes metastasis — one that's often observed in triple negative breast cancer. It has no natural inhibitors, and its three-dimensional folded structure is already mapped out.

In this episode, she explains the way that's led to therapeutic breakthroughs, and new compounds which could be 'game-changers'.

"Patients often ask themselves, is this really worth it to go through all this for the time that it buys me? And if we could offer patients something that was less cytotoxic, that's still providing them with improved survival and benefit in terms of disease control — that would be huge."

Dr. Anderson and her team are also looking at existing pharmaceuticals approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration — and whether any of them are effective against triple negative breast cancer cells.

To date, she said four drugs appear promising, particularly in combination with existing chemotherapy drugs. They're already FDA-approved, making it a far less onerous process to get them to oncologists and their patients.

Chandra Dattani's smile lit up the room, and her laughter was contagious.

But when the beloved Saskatoon businesswoman and volunteer was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer, even her husband, a physician, found very little information about therapies or drugs that could heal her.

"There was very scant literature on triple negative, and I was asking them, why?" said Dr. Dan Dattani.

Typically, oncology teams target estrogen and progesterone receptors to stop breast cancer tumours from growing and spreading.

Unfortunately, those targets don't work for the 15 to 20 per cent of breast cancer patients with triple negative breast cancer, a swift-moving and aggressive form of the disease.

Still, Chandra Dattani and her family decided to fight back.

They established the Chandra Dattani Memorial Fund in 2010. It's currently endowed with a balance of over 120 thousand dollars, and continues to support critical cancer research on an annual basis.

"She was so dedicated to making sure we'd never gave up on ourselves and was really our biggest cheerleader every step of the way," said Seema Jain, Dattani's eldest daugher.

In this episode, Jain joins her siblings and her father in unraveling her mother's story, and pushing for more research and therapies dedicated to women with a triple negative diagnosis.

"Our biggest hope is hopefully women won't have to suffer the way our mom did," said Dr. Sheev Dattani.

"Hopefully there will be better treatments coming down the road."

When Veronica McKinney was little, she made trip after trip to the Saskatoon Public Library, to keep borrowing a Time-Life book about the human body.

"I loved that book and I would read it. I would copy the cover. I can picture it even to this day, all the different little cells," said McKinney, now an assistant professor at the College of Medicine.

"I was just fascinated by how our body works and how it's just so amazing," she said, as she recalled borrowing the book over and over, and tracing the pictures on its cover.

McKinney also considers herself lucky to have learned traditional ways of maintaining health from her mother.

While McKinney's great-grandmother was Cree, the matriarch lost her status when she married a Metis man from northern Alberta. The family built a house on a road allowance near Midnight Lake in Saskatchewan's boreal forest, where McKinney's mother spent her childhood with her hokum learning healing techniques, how to gather medicine from the bush and how to deliver babies.

She passed that knowledge to her daughter Veronica during summers in the north, as they'd visit extended family to fish, and gather berries.

"I still to this day use some of it," said McKinney. "A lot of this is more about how you live your life every day, how we connect to the land."

By the time she was a teenager, McKinney soon saw disparities in the way people treated her Indigenous cousins, mother and family.

"I often thought, like, why are people acting so angry? I couldn't understand that," she said."It was hard to get jobs, even as a teenager, because people wouldn't look at you."

McKinney persevered, enroling first in Arts and Science courses at the University of Saskatchewan, then transferring to train as a laboratory technologist, a career that took her west.

She remembered patients from diverse backgrounds asking her for help, when the Peter Lougheed Centre first opened in north-east Calgary.

"I'd go to poke them in the morning to get their blood, and they'd often kind of grab onto me and look to me to help them," said McKinney, who said most patients just wanted to understand better what was happening to them.

"It really touched me," she said.

After several years in Alberta and British Columbia, McKinney returned to Saskatoon to train as a nurse, while she worked up the courage to apply to medical school.

"That was sort of my mantra, whether it was nursing or lab tech or medicine, that I'm not taking myself out of this mix. I'm going to keep on trying," McKinney said.

"I decided I'd better apply or I'd never get this out of my system," she said. "And they took me!"

McKinney is now a family physician with patients at Saskatoon's West Side Community Clinic. She's also the Director of Northern Medical Services at the College of Medicine, a role she loves for the practical benefits she can bring to remote communities and northern people.

"I like the research that ultimately leads to someting concrete in the communities," she said.

In this episode, she explains remote presence technology, and the way it's lightened the load for caregivers, emergency workers, and families who no longer have to leave their home communities as often to consult with specialists and therapists.

Using video conferencing and remote diagnostic tools including ultrasound equipment, patients and their families learn how to observe warning signs, and how to head off bigger health problems.

McKinney says that means fewer air ambulance trips, easier recoveries with friends and family nearby, along with improved outcomes for hundreds northern patients, including children and expectant mothers.

"There are huge benefits from some of these things," she said. "That also helps with the recruitment and retention of physicians and nurses and various providers, knowing that you can have that backup, that you can connect right away."

McKinney's warm and engaging approach to medicine is centred around connecting patients and care providers, and exploring her curiosity.

She sees medicine as 'a meaningful way' to give back to her community. "I've fallen many times, no two ways about it," she laughed. "I'm learning all the time."

Most patients at a hospital or a clinic walk in sick. Doctors do their best to treat their ailments.

Dr. Neils Koehncke's patients aren't necessarily sick. In fact, most are reasonably healthy and still on the job.

But their duties at work often lead to a plethora of risky situations and occupational hazards.

"It's the flip side of healthy, or at least people healthy enough to work suddenly being exposed to these environments that are really unusual," said Koehncke, the director of the Canadian Centre for Health and Safety in Agriculture (CCHSA).

"It's very intriguing," Koehncke said.

As an associate professor, Koehncke teaches occupational medicine at the University of Saskatchewan's College of Medicine, and he sees outpatients in a clinical setting regularly.

In Saskatchewan, occupational medicine specialists see a higher proportion of farmers, ranchers and agricultural workers in their case load, along with miners and oilpatch workers.

As such, Koehncke wears a number of hats (including a real hardhat), as he collaborates with respirologists, veterinarians, pathologists, neurologists and population health specialists to better understand and mitigate on-the-job hazards.

"The team here [at CCHSA] is so remarkable," he said. "If you're practicing occupational medicine in Saskatchewan, agriculture is going to be a big industry that you come across."

Koehncke spent nearly two decades as Saskatchewan's chief occupational medical officer, and became heavily involved in fatality and injury surveillance on farms.

Through his career, Koehncke also gained practical experience assessing industrial sites through tours and hands-on work at mines, oilfield installations, and foundries.

"The safety is sometimes very obvious, you know, you don't want to get run over by that forklift coming towards you," said Koehncke.

"But the health stuff is less obvious and is sometimes more insidious. And it was just really fascinating."

In this episode, Koehncke speaks about why he became "an occ doc", and about the challenges of compiling and analyzing data from wildly different sources inside workplaces.

From noise, vibration, radiation, heat, cold, ergnomic problems. chemicals, dust, fibres, to psychological and biological hazards that can do long-term damage to frontline workers, Koehncke said there's a role for input from workers, followed by careful analysis and data collection.

That goes hand-in-hand with outreach work, to convey improvements and strategies keeping workers safer on the job.

"Work doesn't have to be a place that actually is harmful to our health over time," Koehncke said.

"We come up with better ways of addressing the risks that actually result in a reduction of mortality and a reduction of illness in the workforce."

To spread hope and cheer in our city, the Office of the Vice-Dean of Research typically runs a charitable donation campaign at the end of each year, during the Christmas break. Again, distancing, masks and video conferencing dominated the College of Medicine's second pandemic holiday season. That prompted graduate students Stefany Cornea and Nayoung Kim to issue a departmental challenge.

Help an elementary school.

Cornea and Kim reached out to some of the schools hardest-hit during Saskatoon's Covid-19 pandemic, and asked what their wish lists included.

In this episode, hear why Cornea and Kim chose King George School -- and what the donation will change for its 106 students.

We hear from both graduate students, along with King George's vice-principal, Anne-Marie Rollo.

She said the donation is 'life-changing' for the elementary school.

"For many of our young children being socially isolated really disconnected them from their family, their land, their culture," said Rollo. "We are incredibly excited for this opportunity,"

In December, Kim and Cornea stopped by King George to drop off the $1,300 donated by biomedical researchers.

They hoped it would be enough to send the school's Grade 7 and 8 students on an end-of-year field trip in June.

But that wasn't where the fundraiser ended.

Cornea, who is doing masters' work characterizing the BRK protein prevalent in both breast cancer and gastric cancer, recalls returning to campus in January.

In the mailbox, she came across an envelope addressed to Dr. Marek Radomski, the Vice-Dean of Research at the College of Medicine.

After she dropped the envelope at his house, Radomski opened it.

Inside he found a cheque for $2,000.

The money was raised by Dr. Mary Kinloch, alumni of the University of Saskatchewan College of Medicine, and members of the Saskatchewan Regional Medical Association.

Cornea said Radomski was stunned.

"He couldn't believe the number on the cheque. He couldn't believe the generosity," Cornea said.

She said in a typical year, the OVDR would raise roughly third of that total.

"It kind of sheds a different light on what not just biomedical researchers can do, but what the College and the physicians, what we all can do when we put our minds to it," said Nayoung Kim, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Biochemistry.

Kim and Cornea said they plan to keep the OVDR in touch with students and staff at King George School.

With a total donation of $3,305, the entire school can now visit Brightwater, a nature reserve just south of Saskatoon.

Parents and family members will also be part of the field trip, which is set for June, according to Rollo.

Kim and Cornea say the idea is a tangible way of investing in Saskatoon's future.

"They're raising people who are going to be providing medical care in our community, maybe raising future students or staff at the College of Medicine," said Cornea.

"It's so cool to see that cycle of support."

From his time as captain of the Saskatoon Blades, to a career with the Saskatoon Police Service and the law -- Bruce Gordon was the kind of father, athlete and coach who inspired everyone around him.

After he was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer in 2017, his wife Chris joined family and friends to start a wave of 'Be Like Bruce' fundraisers.

"We were stunned and to be given a diagnosis of absolutely zero hope was devastating," said Chris Gordon.

In his last months, Bruce spoke openly about his cancer, and how unfair it felt as he went through chemotherapy and tried to make the most of his last weeks on earth.

He and his wife Chris both said the sense of love and community support they felt in that time was 'overwhelming'.

But Chris Gordon also witnessed the pain her husband endured.

"It was excruciating for him," she said. "The treatments, the management for pancreatic cancer. Nobody should have to go through what he had to go through."

After he died, Chris Gordon knew donations in Bruce's name truly had to uphold her husband's motto -- "Community Above All Else".

"I wanted it to have an impact on the community," she said. "I was able to reach out to the university and that's where I discovered the Cancer Research Centre."

Through the College of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan, Chris Gordon set up the Be Like Bruce Memorial Pancreatic Research Fund, with every dollar staying in her city at Saskatoon's Cancer Research Cluster.

Over the past four years, private donations to the the #BelikeBruce Memorial Pancreatic Research fund have raised nearly $50,000.

In this episode, we hear her story, and from both Dr. Andrew Freywald and Dr. Franco Vizeacoumar, who explain why donations like Gordon's are 'absolutely crucial' when equipment malfunctions, or needs to be replaced.

"That definitely helped us to move forward fast and more effectively," said Dr. Freywald. "It helped us also to accelerate pancreatic cancer related work, as well as investigations and other types of cancer."

Over time, Freywald and Vizeacoumar and their teams used their findings in targeting pancreatic cancer tumours to leverage more than $1.3M in grants. Those, in turn, led to advances in treating breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and prostate cancer.

"Getting that laboratory-based discovery into the clinics and that's really the ultimate goal of any cancer researcher. And that's what me and Andrew are striving for," said Dr. Vizeacoumar.

For Vizeacoumar, Freywald and Chris Gordon, the work won't stop anytime soon. They're all motivated to build a better future for anyone diagnosed with cancer.

"I don't wish this upon anybody, that any family go through what our family has gone through," Gordon said. "My hope is to bring awareness and insight to people that our donations do make a difference."

The University of Saskatchewan continues to be a leader in cancer research. Each dollar donated stays in Saskatoon, and has a vital impact on what researchers like Dr. Freywald and Dr. Vizeacoumar are trying to achieve. To find out how you can 'Be Like Bruce' and make a difference, visit the College of Medicine's donation page.