The brain drain is alive and well in Ontario, but in the field of cancer research, it’s increasingly occurring to the province’s advantage.

Dr. Ann Chambers, a Canada Research Chair in Oncology and Distinguished Oncology Scientist at the London Regional Cancer Program, is one such example. After almost 25 years working in the province, she happily describes herself as a “brain drain that worked the other way.”

Born and raised around Boston, Chambers first moved to Canada in the early 1980s for a postdoctoral fellowship at the Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto. In 1983 she was recruited to the University of Western Ontario and the London Regional Cancer Program and has stayed in Canada ever since. 

Chambers leads a team, funded by a grant from the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR), that is researching the role of osteopontin in the development of cancer cells. Her research is considered groundbreaking – and a potential solution to extend the lives of those diagnosed with breast cancer.

Osteopontin is a naturally occurring protein that is usually involved with regular bone development. But osteopontin has been shown to significantly alter how tumours develop, making breast and other cancer cells act more aggressively and spread more quickly to other parts of the body. Dr. Chambers aims to understand how osteopontin makes tumour cells act more aggressively and how to stop them from spreading.

Currently, most breast cancer deaths occur not from the initial tumour, but from growth of metastases that arise either before or after the initial tumour has been diagnosed. Her previous research has shown that elevated levels of osteopontin in patients with breast cancer indicate poor patient survival. Chambers is now monitoring osteopontin’s usefulness in providing accurate prognosis for patients and in detecting the likelihood of breast cancer recurrence. 

“Right now we can measure blood osteopontin levels in patients using a test that we developed. We know high levels are poor prognosis. We know that as levels go up there is a greater likelihood the patient will die and we believe that if they go down the patient may survive longer.”

“The clinical data are very solid,” Chambers adds, saying that one of her biggest goals right now is translating her data to help patients. Chambers is hopeful that some treatments will be available in hospitals within the next five to 10 years. “There is a lot of excellent basic biomedical research, but the next step is to use it efficiently to benefit patients.”

Chambers says that this is where OICR’s grant has been crucial. “As soon as we saw translational research grants were available we were really excited by it.” The grant has allowed Chambers to combine clinical and experimental programs in one research project. This means that the research can be more responsive to clinical trials and vice versa. Chambers’ previous research has involved experimental and clinical aspects that were separate and communication between them was difficult. “To me it has been a rewarding collaboration because it has been keeping everything that’s experimental and clinical in the same package,” Chambers says.

Chambers also feels that her location in London facilitates the research she does. “I like it here very much,” she says. “It’s a good size city for clinical studies. I’m physically located at the London Regional Cancer Centre so there’s lots of opportunity for translational work, which is extremely important to me.”

The first indication for Chambers of how important osteopontin was came over a decade ago. When compiling data from the clinical trials she was performing at the time, she was shocked at how the results developed.

“There was a definite correlation between increased levels of osteopontin and low patient survival,” Chambers says. “That was the first hint anywhere that this was the case. That particular graph made me see that what we were working on might be important.”

Osteopontin has proven more and more important as her research continued. There are currently researchers around the world studying the role osteopontin plays in various different forms of cancer, and Chambers is looking at ways to apply her research to different types of tumours.

“This is a very exciting time to be doing clinical research in breast cancer,” says Chambers. “Breast cancer is no longer treated as one disease; it is now type-based. So treatments are getting much more patient-specific and the idea of targeted therapy is becoming much more important to ensure that patients are treated differently according to the type of tumour they have.” 

“I think Ontario is absolutely amazing,” Chambers says. “The fact that OICR was created says a lot – governments and institutions have come together and recognized that something needs to be done. Ontario is leading the way in saying that cancer is a problem and doing something about it.”