Dr. Vickie Baracos is one of the world’s leading experts on cancer cachexia, a common wasting syndrome, and her groundbreaking research has led to improved diagnosis guidelines and treatments.
By Keri Sweetman
Photographs by Buffy Goodman

Dr. Vickie Baracos isn’t a physician or an oncologist or a cancer surgeon. And her education focused primarily on animals, not humans.
But during more than 40 years as a researcher, her work has helped alleviate the suffering of people with advanced-stage cancers and improve their quality of life.
Baracos, a professor in the University of Alberta’s oncology department, is recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on cancer cachexia, a common wasting syndrome involving weight loss, muscle atrophy, weakness and fatigue. She was named to the Order of Canada in June 2024 in recognition of her groundbreaking research.
According to Baracos, each year, about 90,000 Canadians suffer from cancer cachexia and at least half of them experience severe weight loss. The disorder mainly affects those with advanced cancers, particularly those of the pancreas and other digestive organs, as well as lung cancer. Cachexia reduces quality of life significantly and is a cause of stress for both patients and their families.
Moreover, it can result in the termination of cancer treatment, such as chemotherapy, because the patient can no longer tolerate the therapy. Studies done by Baracos and her collaborators have shown that people with cachexia are more likely to develop severe toxicity or side effects like vomiting and fatigue when undergoing chemotherapy, which means treatment often stops.
“Simply put, this wasting destroys a person’s body so that there is nothing left but skin and bones,” says Baracos. “It’s one of a myriad forms of suffering experienced by people with advanced stages of cancer.”

Her research has focused on the fundamental biology of this complex condition, leading to a better understanding among patients and physicians, and better guidelines for diagnosing and assessing cachexia. She and her team also developed a grading system that is now used worldwide, and her research laid the groundwork for identifying possible treatments.
And though she’s been at the University of Alberta for 40 years, she shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, Baracos recently received a four-year, $1.25-million Game Changer award from the Alberta Cancer Foundation to continue her work alongside a team of medical oncologists, epidemiologists and experts in cancer imaging.
It’s a long way from when she began her academic studies in 1973. Baracos grew up in Winnipeg, the daughter of a physicist mother and a civil engineer father. Her parents had met at the University of Alberta, and that’s where Baracos decided to take her undergraduate courses.
“I’m probably the only professor in an oncology department anywhere whose undergraduate degree was in animal science,” she chuckles. She studied the nutrition and metabolism of animals and was particularly interested in how their muscles grew or wasted away.
Baracos continued pursuing that interest during her PhD in applied biochemistry and nutrition at the University of Nottingham in England. She followed that with a four-year postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School, where she worked with cell biologist Alfred Lewis Goldberg, who was studying muscle growth and breakdown in humans.
Her first publication, jointly with Goldberg, appeared in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine in 1983. It was the first study to describe the role of the cytokine molecule, interleukin-1, in signalling muscles to break down, and the first to make the link between inflammation and loss of muscle mass and function.
Baracos continued her research when she joined the University of Alberta in 1984, working as an experimental scientist and academic in what is now the department of agricultural, food and nutritional science. But a chance meeting with Dr. Anthony Fields, founding Chair of the University of Alberta’s department of oncology, changed the trajectory of her career. When he learned of her research, he insisted that she needed to widen her studies to include cancer and cachexia.
Fields taught Baracos how to work on experimental models of cancer. This research knowledge helped her to access funding to support her work.
Her lab-based cancer research continued for the 19 years she spent in the agriculture department. But Baracos was eager to move into clinical cancer research. “I would not be satisfied if my lifetime contribution was all experimental and I didn’t help anyone with cancer anytime soon,” she says. She landed a position in the department of oncology in 2003 and has been there ever since.
That included 20 years as the Alberta Cancer Foundation’s Chair in Palliative Care (the longest of any Foundation Chairholder), a position she held until 2023. “We made tremendous progress in the fundamental understanding of muscle wasting and cachexia during my tenure as Chair, reinforcing my desire to see these findings move from the bench to the bedside to benefit cancer patients,” Baracos wrote in a summary of her time as Chair.
Dr. Sharon Watanabe, director of the division of palliative care medicine in the University of Alberta’s department of oncology, has known Baracos for 20 years. She describes her as a brilliant scientific mind, and it’s her collaborative skills that make her an exceptional researcher. “It’s her willingness to understand the real-world experience of patients and the health-care providers who are trying to support these patients, forging those relationships and providing opportunities for collaboration.”
Baracos’ research has been absolutely critical to understanding cancer cachexia and moving the field forward, asserts Watanabe.
Cachexia “has a major impact on quality of life when people can no longer enjoy eating. And, when they’re losing weight and losing strength, it affects their ability to function and participate in the activities that are meaningful to them,” says Watanabe, who also directs palliative care at the Cross Cancer Institute. “It can also cause tension because well-meaning family members want their loved ones to eat, but they can’t because of this syndrome.”
There are now nutritional treatments along with exercise and drug therapies available for people with cancer cachexia, with more in development. But there’s still a lot of work ahead.
The Game Changer funding will allow Baracos’ team to review the weight loss of every patient who faced advanced cancer in Alberta, as the first comprehensive study to determine through imaging data how many have cachexia, muscle loss and how severely they have it. Medical oncologists aim to reveal why people with cachexia experience higher levels of toxicity from chemotherapy drugs. By doing so, they hope to develop more personalized and optimal cancer treatments with better outcomes.
The results of the team’s work will be part of Baracos’ legacy in the field.
“You may do things that you feel are successful in your career, but if you want that to live on, you really have to invest in people who are younger than you, bringing their unique strengths to bear on the problem.
“So, for me, one of the great things is that these younger medical oncologists, specialists in nuclear medicine, cancer imaging, epidemiology and nutrition care will gain new evidence to keep this whole field moving forward.”
3 questions with Dr. Vickie Baracos
Where do you get your best ideas?
Reading about what’s going on in science and medicine, and interacting with people.
What was the hardest lesson you’ve learned?
If you get bucked off your horse, get back on again. (Baracos enjoys horse riding as her main interest outside of work.)
Why does your research matter?
Cancer causes suffering in myriad ways. If we can’t always cure it, we must make the life that remains for people with cancer bearable.