Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

With cancer immunotherapy "coming of age", cell-based treatments have emerged as a standard-of-care for leukemia and lymphoma. The next research advance will come from further discovery, development, and optimization of these cell-based therapies. Cellular immunotherapies, however, introduce several layers of complexity that do not exist in development of traditional drugs, and the manufacturing infrastructure required to move pre-clinical discoveries forward for testing in clinical trials is lacking across Canada. EXCELLIRATE CANADA is a pan-Canadian research consortium combining the Canadian Cancer Trials Group's expertise and established network of investigators and clinical trialists with existing national networks of scientists at BioCanRx and the Canadian Virus and Immunology Consortium at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute. Its vision is to establish world-class regional hubs of expertise to decentralize discovery and innovation, manufacturing, and clinical evaluation to improve effectiveness and reduce cost of cell-based immunotherapy cancer treatments. By capitalizing on knowledge, creativity, and expertise of research, clinician, and patient stakeholders across Canada, and in consultation with federal and provincial regulatory agencies, EXCELLIRATE CANADA will enable the unprecedented ability to evaluate custom-designed therapies, and will ultimately facilitate access to a pipeline of immune cell-based therapies for the benefit of all Canadians. Implementation of this decentralized model will not only increase the number of clinical trials to which Canadians patients will have access, but will also facilitate creation of new jobs and development of new human capital through training of highly and uniquely-skilled individuals. CIHR funding will help to support a meeting of key stakeholders in early 2019 to advance this project and, in particular, planning for a grant submission to the Canada Foundation for Innovation 2019 Innovation Fund competition.