We need a mechanism for bringing all that expertise together. We're adding new people to the team all the time. I'm getting phone calls from colleagues at other institutions asking me for the blueprints. Oncology professor David Melnychuk heads the centre's clinical research unit. He says that while the centre is committed to moving the cancer research process along as quickly as it can, it will never jettison safe research practices in the name of speed.
Clinical trials exist for a purpose.
Even when you think you have an excellent theoretical grasp of how a new drug is going to operate at the molecular level, the actual effects of that drug can be surprising sometimes. When you start talking about the potential for side effects or for unexpected reactions, it pays to be careful. The centre, based at the Jewish General Hospital, is in the process of building up an extensive tissue bank that will furnish researchers with tissue specimens containing a wide range of cancerous tumours for their studies. The bank is being put together by pathology professor Lesley Alpert. There are a lot of McGill researchers who each have their own small tissue collections.