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Top Job - Standards of Care
Paul Grundy spent a chunk of the mid-1980s working with three refrigerators that stored every sample of Wilms tumour that the Cross Cancer Institute had treated. The pediatric oncologist created the bank for researchers who were trying to figure out the nature of the kidney disease and why it almost exclusively threatened children so young they’d just begun to walk. But with only four or five Edmonton patients per year, it would take Grundy’s tumour bank decades to become a reliable source for clinical trials that usually depend on thousands of cases to make breakthrough discoveries. He’s patient, but he knew this wouldn’t work.
That’s when he had a breakthrough of his own.
He reckoned that, since the Cross was collecting a few samples a year, so would Calgary’s Tom Baker Cancer Centre, and so would every cancer institute in North America. With the help of the National Wilms Tumor Study (which is a slight misnomer, since the body includes experts from both Canada and the U.S.) he convinced researchers in every state and province to combine their Wilms samples and move the bank to a central location, Columbus, Ohio. “It’s by far the biggest in the world,” he says.
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