A not-for-profit research group with University of Alberta roots is quietly taking its place in the major leagues of global cancer drug testing. When promising new cancer treatments are ready for trial in humans, researchers from around the world turn to Edmonton-based TRIO (Translational Research in Oncology) to run their clinical trials.
“It may seem like an odd place for a company like this to be based, but we started here and we’ve stayed here,” said CEO Launa Aspeslet, a PhD grad from the Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. “There are a lot of brilliant minds that come out of the university, and we do our best to hire and train grads.”
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TRIO got its start with an international trial of the now-approved breast cancer drug Taxotere back in 1997. Moving on to another breast cancer game changer—Herceptin—the company is now running 21 clinical trials for breast, lung, ovarian, liver and gastrointestinal cancer treatments at more than 500 hospitals and cancer centres in 20 countries.
TRIO employs more than 200 people, with the head office in Edmonton, branches in Paris and Montevideo, and consultants in Korea, Russia, Italy and elsewhere.
“TRIO has gone from success to success,” said John Mackey, oncology professor in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry and director of clinical trials at the Cross Cancer Institute. Mackey helped launch the company but is no longer directly involved.
“It started as a breast cancer international research group and has evolved into so much more,” Mackey said. “They’re expanding, launching new trials, and keeping local people employed with IT and other jobs.”
Unique vetting process means only the best drugs are tested
TRIO runs the trials from start to finish—framing the research questions, finding investigators with the right kind of patients, confirming and analyzing data as it comes in, navigating ethics and regulatory protocols, and monitoring patient safety.
The company is actively supported by academics and key cancer opinion leaders from around the world, who volunteer for the board and the scientific committee, and who follow a unique vetting process to choose projects. In many cases, drugs that come to TRIO are first screened against a panel of more than 600 human cancer cell lines in the UCLA laboratory of renowned American oncologist Dennis Slamon. Slamon, who is chairman and executive director of TRIO, discovered that one in five breast cancers contain a gene (HER2+) that can be targeted by the drug Herceptin.
“Before Herceptin, we were treating breast cancer with a one size fits all approach, but we saw that some patients did well, while others did less well with our standard treatments,” Slamon said. “That’s when we realized breast cancer is not just one disease, but a spectrum of diseases.”
“Now we know that other types of cancers have subtypes too,” Salmon said. “It’s a matter of sticking to the data and following the leads.”