Dr. Alison Allan

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Department Chair & Professor (Joint Appointment with Oncology)

More about her research https://bit.ly/AllanLab

Contact Info

alison.allan@lhsc.on.ca (519) 611-2111 Ext. 84054

How has your work changed over the course of the last year?

“One of the projects that we have made a lot of progress with is related to the translational work that we're doing in collaboration with Dr. David Palma in radiation oncology. We have a phase three clinical trial looking at a very specific type of radiation called stereotactic ablative radiotherapy, which allows very precise targeting of metastatic disease. My lab is doing all the blood biomarker collection and analysis for that study. In terms of patient numbers, progress is occurring much faster than we anticipated, even despite COVID. We also recently just got a grant from the Canadian Cancer Society to do some more detailed downstream analysis of the biomarkers. We’re pretty excited.”

“Progress is occurring much faster than we anticipated, even despite COVID”

Generally, what does your day-to-day look like?

“Iam in a unique situation in thatthat my lab is located at the London Regional Cancer Program in Victoria hospital, but I have two offices because I am also Chair of the department. My day never looks the same, which is exciting and is one of the things I love about this job. I spend two to three days a week at the cancer center and then the rest of the week at the university. I also teach ACB 4461 and the biochemistry 4455 coursesin the winter semester. Thissemester has been pretty crazy because I have to balance out all the research work with writing papers, meeting with students and staff, and sometimes doing a little bit of lab work myself (not often enough though!) Then there’s all the administrative pieces of being a chair. The department is actually coming up on an external review where we have to create a self-study report about what we've accomplished in the last five years, and where we are looking to go both on the education and the research side. It’s kind of three jobs right now, but it keeps me busy and it's really interesting.”

What are some of the greatest challenges to your research?

“The major challenge that we face every day as researchers is funding and keeping our programs running. Each individual professor is essentially running what can be compared to a small business. Our salaries are paid by the university when we're hired as professors, but everything else related to our research program is our responsibility. Running a research program is essentially like running a small business, even though we're not trained for that in grad school at all. That’s why this new grant from the Canadian Cancer Society and the one I got last year from CIHR are really exciting because that means I can focus completely on the research. In cancer research, the scientific challenge is really the complexity of the disease. There’s a need to collaborate with other people who have a different expertise than you and bring all those different personalities together to do research. That's more impactful, not only from a scientific point of view, but from a patient perspective as well. The rate at which different cancer therapeutics and different imaging modalities are changing is very high. There’s also a computational side of it that's really coming to the forefront that we also need to keep up with. ”

How do you see the field evolving over the course of the next 5-10 years?

“Breast cancer in particular is making great progress on the development of new targeted agents. There’s definitely a lot of effort that people are putting in to understanding how immunotherapy might be applicable to breast cancer. Breast cancer has not really found it’s true home yet with immuno-oncology drugs, but we'll definitely see more progress in this area in the near future. Another really interesting trend in breast cancer is the movement towards patient informed research; meaning more involvement and input from the patients themselves on the direction of research. Alot of agencies now are requiring you as a scientist to have patient consultants or patient advocates on your research team, so that there's constant feedback about the relevance of the research, how it gets communicated to the public, and how it gets translated. I think it will be a richer kind of research model, because it will bring in more social science, psychologic, socioeconomic, and equity and diversity considerations.”

“In cancer research, the scientific challenge is really the complexity. There’s a need to collaborate with other people who have a different expertise than you”