Sunday House Call, #497, July 27, 2014; Pharmacogenomics arrives in Ottawa

 

The Ottawa Hospital and the Eastern Ontario Regional Laboratory Association (EORLA) announced this past week the opening of Ottawa’s first lab devoted to treating and studying the genetics of cancer.
Dr. Bryan Lo, who most recently worked in the Department of Research at the biotechnology firm Genentech in San Francisco, California, will assume the position of Lead Scientist and Medical Director for The Ottawa Hospital’s Molecular Oncology Diagnostics Laboratory.
The laboratory will function as a clinical diagnostic research lab. It will allow health-care providers to use a form of pharmacogenomics, that is analyze the genetic flaws inside tumour cells and tailor therapies to a patient’s individual type of cancer.
Dr. Bryan Lo received his MD/PhD from the University of Toronto, followed by a medical genetics residency at the Hospital for Sick Children from 1999 to 2004. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Cell Biology at Yale University from 2005 to 2007 when he became a research fellow at Genentech