The Centre for Lymphoid Centre (CLC) Program was established in 2002 under the direction of Drs. Joseph Connors and Randy Gascoyne at BC Cancer, and it comprises an interdisciplinary team of world-leading lymphoid cancer experts including clinicians, hematopathologists, scientists, bioinformaticians and epidemiologists. Our mission is to improve the outcomes of patients suffering from lymphoid cancers by elucidating the complex biology underlying their heterogeneous types and associated clinical courses.

In 1980s, prior to the CLC’s formation, on behalf the BC Cancer Lymphoma Tumor Group, Drs Connors and Gascoyne had constructed a comprehensive quality assurance Lymphoid Cancer Database that records and maintains well-annotated clinical datasets of now over 40,000 patients. This database enables clinical experts to monitor treatment policy outcomes in British Columbia and develop individualized patient care/management strategies for patients diagnosed with lymphoid cancers in the province. This extensive clinical dataset can be secondarily linked to the CLC’s internationally recognized lymphoma biobank of patient samples providing an ideal platform for translational and clinical research addressing lymphoid cancers. Employing this unique resource, the CLC has built a world-class track record leading to more than 400 high profile publications and attracting over 60 million dollars in grant funding.

With the infrastructure of the CLC program, the team strives to discover and define more effective, but less toxic treatment approaches that can be implemented in the publically funded health care system and to assess the real-world impact of therapeutic strategies in lymphoma. The major research strategies employed by our program are genomics-based discovery and development of novel biomarkers and therapeutics for lymphoid cancers as well as outcomes research with an emphasis on translation into clinical impact. In addition, our program supports the training of highly qualified clinicians and research scientists specialized in lymphoid neoplasms. To date, over 50 CLC trainees have graduated from our Centre, and many have become independent researchers in Canada or other countries around the world.

The Major Program Goals of the CLC include:

  1. Improve patient outcomes and quality of life by developing accurate diagnostic/prognostic tools and novel therapeutics.
  2. Discover and characterize novel disease biology underlying lymphoid cancer using state-of-the-art genomics, functional modeling and preclinical drug testing.
  3. Implement biomarker assays in the publically funded health care system to guide clinical management and precision medicine/personalized therapy.
  4. Maintain high quality outcomes research in order to understand the impact of therapeutic strategies and identify unmet clinical needs.
  5. Support the CLC Biobank program and the CLC clinical and pathology databases.
  6. Maintain high-level productivity in translational research, publications and grant applications to continuously support our program and its expansion.
  7. Sustain collaborations with national and international consortia and clinical trial groups to enhance and foster our research program.
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