Significant funding boost takes palliative care research in Canada to new heights

With collaborators from the Pan-Canadian Palliative Care Research Collaborative (PCPCRC), the initiative led by Dr. James Downar from Bruyère Health in Ottawa and Dr. Kieran Quinn from Sinai Health in Toronto will transform care for people living with advanced cancer by studying new interventions in patient-centered trials. These important efforts will further train the next generation of leaders in palliative care research and elevate Canada as a global leader in palliative care.

“This is an incredible opportunity to build sustainable infrastructure for clinical trials that can have lasting impact,” said Dr. Downar, Senior Investigator at Bruyère Health Research Institute and co-chair of the PCPCRC. “This funding supports a national network of researchers with a broad range of expertise and a clinical trials platform comprised of ten research hubs across Canada, allowing us to expand the nation’s capacity for multi-site trials and create a foundation for research that can improve care for Canadians.”

Despite recent transformative advancements in cancer treatment, options remain limited for improving symptoms and quality of life in people with advanced cancer. As a result, patients and their caregivers continue to endure considerable physical and psychological suffering. Researchers hope to tackle some of these challenges through a stronger system of identifying, testing, and disseminating novel treatments through this Pan-Canadian platform that can better leverage the diverse expertise of Canada’s palliative care community.

Dr. Quinn, a General Internist and Palliative Care Clinician-Scientist at Hennick Bridgepoint Hospital, Sinai Health, has been pivotal in establishing a new network of Canadian experts in clinical research to recruit clinical trial participants across multiple care settings. This shift has not only improved access to new experimental treatments for a larger patient population but has also accelerated the creation of new knowledge by running multiple trials on the same platform in parallel.

By building the new platform, the PCPCRC will similarly be able to run multiple trials, which is critical to reducing costs and improving the value Canadians derive from these ground-breaking research efforts.

Dr. Quinn, who is also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto, says, “Randomized clinical trials are the gold standard for evaluating new treatments before widespread health system adoption. We will recruit patients and their caregivers across all settings in which they receive care – from the community, to the hospital, and in hospice or the palliative care unit. Our goal is to discover new interventions that can improve their quality of life as they navigate the complex journey of living with advanced cancer.”

Since 2017, the PCPCRC has grown from a small group of palliative care researchers to a network of hundreds of engaging researchers, clinicians, and patient and caregiver partners who take a cross-collaborative approach to clinical trials. They will now be focused on establishing the clinical trials platform by setting up ten platform hubs from Vancouver to Halifax and standardizing key patient-centred measures for all trials.

Following input from the PCPCRC’s patient and caregiver partners and positive results from feasibility studies conducted by PCPCRC members including Dr. Downar’s team in Ottawa, the platform will run its first three clinical trials to test the effectiveness of interventions to alleviate patient and caregiver distress: microdose psilocybin, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), and peer-to-peer caregiver support.

With hubs from coast-to-coast, this research has the potential to transform palliative care for Canadians with advanced cancer and their caregivers.