National Workshop on Radiation and Air Pollutant Induced Disease Prevention and Early Detection
Description: Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer diagnosis and death in Canada. While three in five lung cancers are caused by tobacco smoking, 40% of cases are attributable to environmental toxicant exposures such as radioactive radon gas and combustion particulates from wildfires, industry and vehicles, as well as regionalized or demographic-specific factors such as groundwater arsenic, ethnicity-specific genetic risk, and/or inflammatory lung diseases. Lung cancer has a high fatality rate, due to late diagnosis and subsequent limited treatment options; while emerging lung cancer screening programs promise to diagnose these cancers at earlier stages, at this time programs are unable to accept patients outside of a tobacco smoking history-centric paradigm. Thus, an urgent challenge is to develop technology, processes, and the knowledge needed to assess an individual's personal risk of lung cancer based on non-tobacco causes, enabling life-saving screening to be offered to all those who need it. It is our goal to consolidate Canadian leadership of worldwide lung cancer research, and accelerate progress in environmental lung toxicant exposure reduction to make a positive difference to the future health of Canadians. As part of this, we will initiate and further develop multiple Canadian environmental lung cancer research endeavors into prevention and early cancer detection, spearheading new transdisciplinary funding applications to major agencies. The summit workshop will convene multiple Canadian research teams in environmental lung cancer research, together with funding partners, and community, government, and industry stakeholders. The purpose is to advance team projects, network with key academic, industry, and government stakeholders, develop research strategies for as-yet unfunded projects including prospective non-tobacco lung cancer biobanking, showcase current research, and coordinate communication strategies for community-impacting near-term initiatives.
Amount: CA$10,000
Funding type: planning
Funder scheme: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support
Start date: 2024-06-01
End date: 2025-05-31
Investigator: Aaron Goodarzi
Institution: University of Calgary
Funded outputs count: 0
Funder award ID: 195109_1
OpenAlex ID: G1504615099