Finding the right talent to find a cure

Ask Tom Hudson what's new, what's different, what's significantly changed in the last little while at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, where he is president and scientific director, and Hudson immediately cites a personnel, not scientific, breakthrough.

"We just landed a spectacular recruit from Eli Lilly to launch the Medicinal Chemistry Platform," enthuses the 47-year-old genomicist whose own recruitment from McGill University in 2006 was likened in at least one Toronto newspaper to the arrival of a scientific messiah.

While Hudson's reply seems a fitting response for a man who has been literally flying around the world to entice the planet's best cancer scientists to staff the institution intended to both reconfigure and accelerate cancer research in the province, his words are also immensely revelatory about the nature of modern medical research. Everyone is in almost mano-a-mano competition with everyone and everywhere else for the services of what author and urban theorist Dr. Richard Florida has called the "creative class."

This is because science's organizational parallel in the nonscientific world is not business or government, but sport. Successful research does not build on talent. As is the case in baseball or football or hockey, in many ways the success of a research team is indistinguishable from its talent.

"If you are an NHL hockey coach, you want the world's best defenseman on your team. But they can go anywhere they want. It's exactly the same with us because there just aren't that many people in the world that places like ours really want and need," says Hudson.

To see how OICR's search for the talent to literally "become itself" is playing itself out, one has to first return to the rationale for the $347 million enterprise's existence. In December 2005, Premier Dalton McGuinty announced the institute's formation by pointing out that while there had been stellar cancer research in Ontario in the past, the research had, by and large, been conducted in a piecemeal, uncoordinated way, with geographically separate groups working independently of one another. "This meant that sometimes the big ideas with great promise, the ideas that required many teams to work together, didn't always get the support they needed," said McGuinty.

What OICR would do is not only coordinate research between existing research organizations, but bring 50 of the best cancer scientists in the world to Ontario. That would roughly double the number of cancer researchers in the province. Equally important, OICR's existence would double the money to support them. "If we work together and focus our research and get the best people, we can give every person the hope that someday, maybe right here in Ontario, cancer will be beaten," McGuinty continued.

The approach was a very "Canadianized" view of how cancer research should be conducted. If in 1971 U.S. President Richard Nixon described his country's efforts as "a war on cancer" (which was his generation's equivalent of a putting a man on the moon), the Ontario approach was to see cancer less as the enemy and more like a medical condition that had to be understood before it could be dealt with.

"We're not fighting a war with cancer. In many ways we are building an encyclopedia that will help us explain and then to cure cancer," says Hudson.

In keeping with this less combative world-view, Premier McGuinty announced that OICR's mandate was not only to coordinate and expand research across the province, but to link itself up with cancer research efforts across the country and around the world.

How has OICR moved ahead in the roughly two years since it has been in operation?

Clearly, its first coup was to lure Hudson, who had been heading up the Genome Quebec Innovation Centre, while at the same time coordinating the Canadian contributions to the International HapMap Project. The HapMap was the first effort to enumerate the genetic differences that exist between the world's four major ethnic groups; it was published in 2005.

After this, Hudson began growing unhappy with two aspects of his life. The first was how routinized his work had become. "I had built a great centre for finding genes, and finding genes was becoming too easy," he recalls while sitting with his hands behind his head in his office on the eighth flour of the MaRS building. "And I was also thinking what kind of translational research was possible in taking genomics a step forward. The question for me increasingly became 'How do I answer questions that are more clinically relevant?'"

Then he heard about OICR. With great excitement, he began shipping off a list of people in the U.S. that he thought would be suitable to head up the new organization. After that, he had what they call in French an aperçu: If OICR was such a wonderful job for others, why wasn't it also a wonderful job for an increasingly discontented Tom Hudson?

What was particularly attractive to him was OICR's vision of research and clinical applications synergy - the notion that what comes out of the labs should end up not as just another scientific publication listed in the CV of its discoverers, but as something that found its way into the hands and - more importantly - into the bodies of the ill.

After he joined, the first step in securing OICR's future was the formulation of a strategic plan. "We didn't want to replace the basic research already going on in other institutions, so we had to say,'What can we do better? What can be our strengths? What are the existing gaps?'" says Hudson.

In 2007, what Hudson calls an "evolving strategic plan" was announced with several important research and translational features. To begin with, OICR would create what it called the Ontario Cancer Cohort. The aim of the cohort was to prospectively study a large group of people in the province in order to better understand the often confusing biology associated with both cancer and its treatments. One murky area was the risk factors that initiate or accelerate cancer. Another was the natural history of biomarkers. A third was the clinical potential of new blood-based biologic markers of early disease states, and a fourth was the effectiveness of advanced imaging technologies in seeing cancers earlier and better.

The latter fed into what OICR was calling its One Millimetre Cancer Challenge. Its goal was to develop a variety of screening techniques and technologies that could identify cancers when they were a few millimetres in diameter - a size when tumours are easier to treat or remove.

The program also aimed to develop an understanding of the biology of cancer stem cells as it affected all stages of cancer development and treatment. It would build on the world-famous cancer stem cell research conducted by the University Health Network's John Dick.

Discovering vulnerabilities in the genome of cancers, identifying new therapies and developing selective drug therapies akin to the breast cancer drug Herceptin were additional struts in the strategic plan.

To generate and make sense of the data, the OICR plan made it clear that Ontario scientists would require the best and fastest of 21st-century technologies, machines ranging from high-definition imagers to supercomputers to state-of-the-art gene sequencers. The plan also envisioned expanding previous expertise in clinical trials to create what was called a High Content Trials Program. Its openly immodest goal was to institute the best clinical trials program not in Ontario, not in Canada, but in the world.

As a final step, the first international strategic alliance was put in place linking OICR with Harvard/MIT's Broad Institute and its skills in genomics, computational biology and chemical biology. What soon followed were the funding and agreements that were needed to begin construction of the hockey the rink on which OICR's star scientists would play.

A strategic alliance was struck with California in 2007 to coordinate stem cell research between that state and the province of Ontario. Subsequently, in late April of 2008 it was announced OICR would take a lead role in the International Cancer Genome Consortium, an effort by scientists in 22 countries to map the genetic mutations that cause the world's 50 most common cancers.

On its behalf, OICR agreed to map the mutations in pancreatic cancer, a disease so deadly and so untreatable that 98 per cent of those diagnosed with it die within six months.

But all this did not address the talent recruitment question. It is a question that might be best phrased: If Ontario builds and funds OICR, will they - the smart, ambitious, driven, creative, much sought-after, can-go-anywhere stars of the cancer research world - come and join the Ontario team?

The answer appears to be yes. Hudson reels off the provenance of some of his 18 new recruits. Many of them played in the scientific major leagues with the best teams: Genentech, Stanford, Sloan-Kettering, Harvard Medical School, the Baylor College of Medicine, London, not to mention Rima Al-awar, Hudson's star catch from Eli Lilly.

What is interesting is why they came. In a sotto voce tone, Hudson describes how his recruitment strategy targets not just the recruit but the needs of his or her entire family. How he takes them to the top of MaRS and shows how many worldclass research hospitals and facilities - and other scientists - are literally within blocks of where they will work.

What he doesn't say, but others do, is that he himself is one of the main draws.

"Tom Hudson is a very energetic person with great experience in managing large, diverse projects," remarks John McPherson, OICR's cancer genomics director and its major league recruit from Baylor.

But equally important to McPherson was the appeal of what might be called OICR's vision that research without application is like a fish without gills. "Like Tom, I have been involved in quite a few large-scale projects that primarily generated large public data sets - such as the Human Genome Project. Managing these projects left little time to actually use the data and to see what impact it had clinically," reflects McPherson, a Canadian educated at Queen's University before going off to work in the U.S.

But there is also something intangible involved in the pitch to help propel OICR into the scientific major leagues. After showing the Toronto research world-view from the top of MaRS, after making the pitch about OICR's drive for collaboration and its thrust for clinical application, Hudson goes back to the future. "I bring them downstairs because on the first floor MaRS has put Frederick Banting's desk on display. They almost all know about Banting. They know about insulin being first discovered in Toronto. And then I say, 'That's where he sat,' implying that's where your desk can sit someday too."

As baseball and hockey players and, apparently, scientists all know, talent likes to go to where the winning teams are now and have always been.