Dr. Poul Sorensen, a Professor of Pathology at the University of British Columbia, has dedicated his career to understanding the biologic underpinnings of childhood cancers. His B.C. Cancer Research Agency lab uses a combination of genetic and biochemical approaches to identify proteins or pathways altered in human tumours, starting with childhood cancers. His internationally recognized work has resulted in the discovery of many different genetic alterations in human cancers, most notably a novel type of genomic alteration called an NTRK gene fusion, that causes diverse types of childhood cancer, breast tumours, and other human malignancies including colorectal, lung, thyroid, and brain cancers.

His discovery of NTRK fusions led to the development of new treatments for patients whose cancer is caused by this genomic alteration. One such treatment, larotrectinib, is the first drug to be simultaneously studied and approved for both pediatric and adult cancers by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Nov. 26, 2018. On July 10, 2019, larotrectinib was approved by Health Canada with the brand name VITRAKVI® as a tumour agnostic treatment that can be used to treat more than 24 forms of cancer with this genomic alteration, including rare pediatric cancers. Tumour agnostic treatments can be used to treat cancers that have a specific genomic alteration, regardless of where in the body the tumour is located or what the tumour looks like under the microscope.

VITRAKVI, a Bayer product, has already had a positive impact on Canadian patients. One such patient, now 10, had a dramatic positive response. At five years old, he was diagnosed with stage 4 thyroid cancer and after three long years, the available treatments were not working. Once it was determined that the boy had the rare genomic alteration that was discovered by Sorensen, he was given VITRAKVI as part of a clinical trial and the child’s condition improved substantially.

This child’s improvement is not a singular occurrence. A large body of work validating the clinical efficacy and safety of VITRAVKI in clinical studies has been reported. In clinical trials, 79% of VITRAKVI-treated patients who had this type of genomic alteration had a decrease in their tumour size. In pediatric patients, 90 per cent had a decrease in their tumour size, and 23 per cent of them had a complete response resulting in no further evidence of the cancer. For many of these young patients, the only other option was amputation or disfiguring surgery. It is Dr. Sorensen’s breakthrough research 20 years earlier that paved the way to help understand this form of cancer and subsequently allowed other researchers to develop new targeted treatments such as VITRAKVI.

Dr. Sorensen has already received numerous prestigious awards, including:

• 2021 American Association for Cancer Research Team Science Award
• 2021 Aubrey J Tingle Prize from the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research for outstanding clinical research in B.C.
• 2019 Bloom Burton Award, recognizing the greatest contributors to Canada’s innovative health industry
• 2019 Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada for outstanding contributions in life sciences research
• 2016 Canadian Cancer Society’s Robert L. Noble Prize for basic cancer research
• 2016 August-Wilhelm Scheer Gast Professorship Prize from Technical University Munich.

It is the mother of the boy with thyroid cancer who best describes why Dr. Sorensen should be awarded the Order of British Columbia. As she stated in a Sept 29, 2019 CBC article, “You have given us the greatest gift,” she said to Dr. Sorensen, “Every new day that we get to spend together as a family, making more memories, it’s because of you and your research.