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Michael Shapiro established the Ira
Schneider Memorial Foundation
to honour his dear friend, Ira
Schneider, who passed away
from cancer in 1991. Through this
Foundation, Michael Shapiro is
supporting promising research that
he hopes will lead to treatments
more effective in eradicating
cancers that don’t respond well to
today’s therapies.
“Our Foundation was created in
tribute to Ira’s valiant fight against
cancer and to fund the most
promising areas of cancer research
and treatment,” says Michael.
The outstanding work that is taking
place at The Princess Margaret in
the area of epigenetics came to
his attention last year. In particular,
the published work of one of our
leading young scientists, Dr. Daniel
De Carvalho, caught his interest.
Dr. De Carvalho’s research team
discovered a mechanism to mimic
a virus and potentially trigger an
immune response to fight the
cancer like an infection.
“By mimicking a virus, the potential
is to trick the immune system
into ‘seeing’ the cancer cells as
an infection that needs to be
destroyed,” says Dr. De Carvalho, an
expert in cancer epigenetics.
The $250,000 (U.S.) funding
from the Ira Schneider Memorial
Cancer Foundation will allowThe
Princess Margaret to initiate a
Phase II clinical trial under the joint
leadership of Drs. De Carvalho
and Lillian Siu to study how three
tumor types (colon, ovarian and
breast) respond to a combination
of targeted drugs.
Fighting cancer with
viruses (or agents that
can act like viruses)
Dr. Daniel De Carvalho and his team are
doing pioneering work using therapeutic
agents that mimic viruses, in order to trigger
a response from the immune system that will
destroy cells infected with the virus. There is
tremendous potential for these agents to work
in combination with another class of drugs
called immune checkpoint inhibitors. Immune
checkpoint inhibitors remove the brakes from
our immune system to allow it to attack ‘foreign’
substances in the body, including viruses
.
International support for our
leading work in Epigenetics
14
2016 Report to Our Donors
Ira Schneider, photo taken in 1985
