Head of the Department of Radiation Oncology since 2020, Dr. Cynthia Ménard draws inspiration from mentors she met earlier in her career at the National Institute of Health and Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto to share her passion for radiation oncology and her sense of commitment to patients in order to elevate health practices. “I aspire to change things by pushing boundaries. Going with the status quo is not enough, because there is always a way to do better!”
This philosophy has always accompanied her in her research since she joined the CRCHUM in 2015. And her desire to innovate has borne fruit, since the last year has been marked by success for her laboratory.
A successful step
First, Dr. Ménard’s team and its partners obtained promising results from her phase 2 randomized controlled trial that started in 2018, which aimed to evaluate the effect of intensified radiotherapy guided by a radiotracer and positron emission tomography (PET) on the condition of patients with prostate cancer.
“We realized that cancer was sometimes more prominent than traditional imaging allowed us to guess. We therefore wanted to demonstrate that improving the quality of radiotherapy with a more efficient imaging tool makes it possible to better define the extent of the cancer and, consequently, to intensify radiotherapy and improve the patient’s condition.”
— Dr. Cynthia Ménard
The promising findings, published in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology*Biology*Physics in July 2023, indicate that patients benefited from this approach in terms of toxicity and disease intensification. The latest results were presented at the European Association of Urology congress.
Toward a health care revolution
This phase 2 trial enabled Dr. Ménard to win $3M in funding in 2020 from the Canadian Cancer Society and the Movember Foundation to conduct a national phase 3 clinical trial. They completed the enrollment of 800 patients from 19 health facilities across Canada last January after three years of work.
This large-scale study will confirm whether the new therapy approach is superior to current medical protocols and evaluate whether the benefits of the treatment outweigh any possible side effects. It will also provide valuable data to determine whether patients’ quality of life improves in the long run.
“It’s a never-before-seen large-scale study on this subject that will allow hospitals around the world to adapt their treatments,” said Dr. Ménard.
Interdisciplinarity in service of innovation
Studies of this scope are obviously not done in a vacuum; they involve the synergy of several collaborators, especially the radiotherapy, nuclear medicine, urology and oncology research units, in addition to the many partners in Canadian academic centres.
A little anecdote: when the CRCHUM moved to its new premises in 2014, Dr. Ménard was assigned an office next to a radiochemist, Jean Dasilva, who is passionate about the development of tracers for PET imaging. Chance led them to collaborate to develop a tracer, which she used in her research in radiation oncology.
“The goal of the Imaging and Engineering Research Theme is to connect researchers with complementary fields of expertise, even if they come from different fields, so that they can collaborate on projects, and that’s what happened,” she said. This new tracer was certainly a catalyst for her subsequent research!
This portrait is taken from our 2023-2024 Activity Report
