Community Against Cancer Podcast: Recent Episodes
Ottawa Regional Cancer Foundation
The Community Against Cancer Podcast is your gateway into the world of cancer care, giving you exclusive updates on how donors at the Ottawa Regional Cancer Foundation are changing lives through local clinical trials, research, and Cancer Coaching.
Dr. Stern is an incredible Canadian healthcare leader; over his impressive career, he has held many positions, including the Surgeoner-in-Chief at The Ottawa Hospital, Chairman at the Department of Surgery at the University of Ottawa, and Chief Executive Officer of the Ottawa Regional Cancer Centre and the Jewish General Hospital. He has also led major fundraising campaigns to help build the cancer centre in Ottawa and the hospital critical care tower in Montreal.
We speak with Dr. Stern about his extensive work in healthcare, how safety and quality of care have improved for cancer patients, and his hopes for the future of cancer care.
Dr. John Bell is Senior Scientist at The Ottawa Hospital Research Institute and a professor in the departments of medicine and biochemistry, microbiology and immunology at the University of Ottawa. Dr. Bell sits with our host, Matt Jacques to speak about his ground-breaking work in cancer immunotherapy, and how donors of the Ottawa Regional Cancer Foundation have given him the tools that he and his team need to discover new and innovative ways of treating cancer.
In this episode, Matt Jacques speaks with two Cancer Coaches. Melina Ladouceur and Patricia Barrett-Robillard are both Cancer Coaches at the Ottawa Regional Cancer Foundation and meet with families and individuals facing cancer to help identify and work through their current difficulties, explore decisions that are right for them and support them in making choices that work.
They talk about examples of reasons that people see a Cancer Coach, some clients and experiences that have stuck with the Coaches, and how to support a loved one facing cancer through the holiday season.
Dr. Rebecca Auer is the Director of the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute’s Cancer Therapeutics Program. She is also a leading surgical oncologist and translational specialist, helping some of the most promising new cancer therapies move from bench to bedside. Her current focus involves understanding how cancer spreads after surgery and discovering new ways to prevent it from happening.
In 2007, she opened her own lab right here in Ottawa where she and her team work on developing new cancer therapeutics for perioperative cancer care, which is care around the time of surgery. Discoveries in her lab have used approaches like immunotherapy and oncolytic viruses, and have resulted in new and exciting clinical trials that are helping local families who are facing cancer.
Dr. Auer shared her incredibly moving Hope For Tuesday story last year to donors at the Ottawa Regional Cancer Foundation for Giving Tuesday. In that story, she explained how she remains hopeful for the future of cancer care because of her role on the translational cancer research team, and from seeing clinical trials work miracles on cancer patients. To read her story, please visit hopefortuesday.ca.
Laurie Tresa is a woman living with metastatic breast cancer and a former client of Cancer Coach Patti Barrett-Robillard. Laurie shares details about her cancer journey and how the support of donors at the Ottawa Regional Cancer Foundation helped her take back control of her life through Cancer Coaching.
Laurie and host Matt Jacques talk about her diagnosis, what she currently faces, and how Coaching helped her.
Dr Sinclair is the Director of Neurosurgical Oncology and Director of Cerebrovascular Surgery and at The Ottawa Hospital. He completed his neurosurgery residency through the University of Ottawa in 2002, and after 3 years of fellowship training, he returned to Ottawa in 2005 where has been practicing ever since. His subspecialties are neuro-oncology and vascular neurosurgery. He has helped bring exciting new technologies and surgical approaches to Ottawa such as CyberKnife radiosurgery, the integration of awake surgery into mainstream treatment of brain tumours, and most recently, fluorescence-guided surgery.
In this episode we take a deep-dive into the world of neuro-oncology and what surgery is like for local brain cancer patients.