The Princess Margaret “Transformers”

17 THE TRANSFORMERS • TECHNOLOGY ISSUE Acute myeloid leukemia is a disease of great variability, but it isn’t traditionally treated that way. As Hematologist Dr. Jean Wang explains, the seriousness of the disease forces a one-size-fits-all treatment. “Everybody gets standard chemotherapy upfront,” she says, “because of the time it takes to get the test results that tell us who’s at a higher risk or lower risk, and we really can’t delay treating these patients.” But in her work as Affiliate Scientist at The Princess Margaret, Dr. Wang is finding better answers in a 17- gene expression signature — a unique indicator called the LSC17 score — derived from leukemia stem cells. “Leukemia stem cells are the key cells that start and drive the disease, and these are the cells that we have to kill in order to cure patients,” Dr. Wang says. “With the LSC17 score, we can now rapidly identify high-risk patients who we know probably won’t be cured by standard upfront chemotherapy and might be better served by an experimental therapy in a clinical trial.” LEUKEMIA: KNOWING ITS SIGNATURE Measurement of gene expression used to be expensive and time- consuming. But a new technology platform called nCounter from NanoString has changed that. Dr. Wang explains, “The nCounter system is a digital barcode platform that counts RNA molecules, so it’s very fast and very cost-effective. We can get an accurate result in days.” To Dr. Wang, there is great promise at the intersection of clinical practice and big data. “Technology is advancing at such a rate that it allows us to do more, but at the same time we need to develop new tools to sift through all the data being generated and determine its biological relevance. So we’re working more with Bioinformaticians,” she explains. “We really need people who have a foot in both worlds, in biology and informatics, to help us dig through the noise and find the important correlations.” IN 2016, DR. WANG RECEIVED $3.4 MILLION IN FUNDING FROM GENOME CANADA’S GENOMIC APPLICATIONS PARTNERSHIP PROGRAM (GAPP) FOR CANCER IMMUNOTHERAPY RESEARCH TECHNOLOGY HARNESSING THE POWER OF A CELL POWER OF A CELL LOGY