Wheelin' Warriors of the North take on the Workout to Conquer Cancer this month as the cycling group shifts gears towards the new fundraising avenue.
Wheelin’ Warriors raised more than $2 million since 2012 for cancer research before the fundraiser, Tour de Cure, announced its end on Oct. 29, 2024. The two-day, 200-kilometre ride, which started in Cloverdale and ended in Hope, had seen hundreds of cyclists participate each year.
The event ran for 16 years, raising more than $131 million for cancer research.
Now the Prince George-based Wheelin' Warriors of the North will take on the BC Cancer Foundation workout challenge where participants commit to moving for a minimum 30 minutes every day for the Month of May to raise a minimum of $5,000.
“The funds raised by our team will support SIMPLIFY-SABR-COMET, an international clinical trial lead from BC Cancer Centre for the North-Prince George,” Karin Piche, team captain said on the donation page.
The Citizen talked to Dr. Rob Olson who is the principal investigator on multiple national and international clinical trials, including the phase III SABR-COMET-3 trial which is a follow-up to the landmark SABR-COMET trial.
Olson is a practicing Radiation Oncologist at BC Cancer and Professor at UBC in the Department of Surgery, Division of Radiation Oncology and Developmental Radiotherapeutics. His clinical practice is predominantly focused on head and neck, breast, and oligometastatic cancers (limited number of sites where the cancer has spread in the body). Olson’s research focus includes patient reported outcomes, health services delivery research (with a focus on rural cancer care delivery), and clinical trials. He is the division head of radiation oncology provincially at UBC, and the first associate head, research, for the department of surgery at UBC. He supervises graduate students at both UBC and UNBC.
“SABR is a high precision form of radiation that’s not super cutting edge anymore but we did lead a lot of that innovation,” Olson said.
SIMPLIFY-SABR-COMET, an international clinical trial, will test the use of a single dose of Stereotactic ablative radiotherapy (SABR), a high-precision therapy that safely delivers higher doses of radiation to the tumour site, while limiting doses to healthy tissues, and is expected to reduce side effects and increase the chance of a complete remission for people with metastatic cancer.
“We call this a basket trial because people in the trial will have breast cancer or lung cancer or kidney cancer and it has spread to anywhere in their body – it just has to be less than five spots,” Olson said. “It’s one treatment versus multiple within a week or a couple of weeks. The reason why that’s important is from the Prince George/Northern BC lens and also our desire to help all of rural Canada. It will make it less burdensome for people who don’t live near a cancer centre. I guess that’s less of a Prince George problem and more of a Smithers or Terrace problem. From an efficiency point of view, as you’re probably aware, we’re still sending patients down to the States because our radiation treatment wait lists are still pretty long. So this is a way for us to be more efficient so we can see more patients.”
His trial is specifically looking at metastatic cancer, Olson said. Metastatic means the cancer has spread from its primary site to another part of the body.
“But it will also help that patient who has breast cancer or prostate cancer get cured because our waitlists are shorter because our machines are less busy,” Olson explained.
“That’s the idea, to be more efficient and more convenient for patients. I think this is super-interesting from an academic and a patient-centred point of view. Not at all interesting to companies who fund some research because I am essentially advocating to use less resources of theirs. Why would a machine company want to pay for something that means we are more efficient and that’s why we need to fundraise. When you do these really academic trials they are not great money makers. They are patient-centric – what’s the best care? Not how do I make a company more money? So that’s why philanthropy is pretty critical to this trial.”
The research does get some funding that’s not industry related but it’s not part of the Ministry’s mandate to fund clinical trials, Olson added.
The new clinical trial, called SIMPLIFY, will be available at all six BC Cancer centres and at least 15 international sites. The trial will help shape the future of precision radiation therapy internationally and further demonstrate BC Cancer's global leadership in cancer research and innovation.
“The important thing is I am running the trial from Prince George and all my main staff that run it are living in Prince George and are working in our building,” Olson said.
“So people can support an enterprise that is taking place here and the students who are working on the trial are all getting educated in Northern BC and that’s important because we’re building up our research infrastructure, which to be honest sees Northern Health and Northern BC in its infancy stage of it so we’re behind but BC Cancer Foundation is ahead as a provincial organization and this is helping Northern BC become more involved in clinical trials.”
Northern Health is helping with the imaging, Olson added. So it is a partnership.
“I really appreciate what the Wheelin’ Warriors are doing,” Olson said. “They’re great.”
Findings from Dr. Olson's previous SABR trial, SABR-5, were published last fall with positive results. The trial used up to eight SABR treatments and found side effects from SABR are low and the control of cancer spread is high at 90 per cent at one year. Importantly, it found SABR treatments led to complete remission for some metastatic patients, where existing therapies are only effective at slowing or reducing the tumors.
“SABR destroys cancer cells and cancer DNA at the molecular level,” explains Dr. Olson. “Our goal is to provide this revolutionary solution for the most difficult to treat cancers with less toxicity. We are not only attempting to keep toxicity rates low and control rates high, but we are now also focusing on making it more cost-effective and convenient for patients by testing high dose, single treatment SABR. We’re proud to be leading a global movement here in Prince George to make SABR the standard of care.”
