The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

www.oakvillebeaver.com The Oakville Beaver Weekend, Saturday May 5, 2007 - 3 Scientist wages personal battle against cancer By Angela Blackburn OAKVILLE BEAVER STAFF Oakville's Dr. Dan Dumont is among the elite of scientific minds in Canada. He researches cancer -- and has cancer himself. The cruelty of being afflicted with the same disease one is studying is not new. Dumont in fact knew -- his lab was across the hall from -- William E. Rawls, a researcher who also had cancer and in whose name the Canadian Cancer Society hands out an annual research prize. In 2003, Dumont was awarded that prize -- $1,000 for the recipient and $20,000 for their research --to a young researcher whose work has led to important advances in cancer control within the past decade. Dumont, 46, a father of two children aged eight and 10, heads up The Dumont Lab at Toronto's Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. He is also Sunnybrook's director of Molecular and Cellular Biology. He is head of The Centre for Proteomic Studies at Sunnybrook Research Institute. He is a Canada Research Chair in Angiogenic and Lymphangiogenic Signaling and, he is a professor with the Department of Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto. He received the William E. Rawls prize for the identification and characterization of several angiogenic receptors including Tek/Tie2, Tie1, flk 1/VEGFR2, Endoglin and flt4/VEGRF3. In layman's terms, Dumont said tumors need nourishment to grow and appear able to induce blood vessels to grow toward them in order to obtain that nourishment. Dumont identified a group of molecules found in blood vessels that play a role in that process and that identification set the stage for further research. Three years prior to the award however, Dumont was named a Canada Research Chair. The federal program is at the heart of a national strategy to make Canada one of the world's top five countries for research and develop- DEREK WOOLLAM / SPECIAL TO THE BEAVER CANCER FIGHTER: Dr. Dan Dumont, Director of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Toronto's Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, is heading up a team in this year's Relay for Life at Appleby College in June. Not only is he an expert in cancer research, he is a cancer survivor. ment. In 2000, the government of Canada embarked on a goal to establish 2,000 research professorships ­ chairs ­ in universities across the country by 2008. The program invests $300 million a year to attract and retain some of the world's most accomplished and promising minds. Dumont was, and continues to be, one of them and admits it's "a feather in your cap." An Oakville resident since 1992, Dumont grew up in an army family, moving from place to place, with thoughts of becoming a veterinarian. The polite, affable and quiet man who makes his home with his children and wife Anne, in River Oaks, is humble about his intellect. "I've never had an IQ test," he said, noting, "My work is a trade, the same as anything else." He said if he opened the hood of a Mercedes he wouldn't know the first thing about what's under it. Born in Winnipeg to mom "Bunny," who makes her home in Montreal and dad, Don, who passed away when Dumont was 18, he has one sister, Lynne, a couple years younger than himself, who is a paramedic and lives in Kingston with her husband, who just returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan. "My dad was in the army, so we moved every two or three years. I was never any place I would call home," he said. He attended high school in Kingston, then did his undergraduate studies at Concordia University in Montreal. It was the beginning of 13 years of university study to be followed by five years in a fellowship position. "Originally I wanted to be a vet," he said, noting he happened into his career because "things just played out that way" after he landed a job as a lab technician early in his university career. After earning a Bachelor of Science degree, he did his Masters. He attended McMaster University to earn his PhD studying microbiology and virology. Dumont did his post doctoral fellowship at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto and worked at Princess Margaret's AMGEM Oncology Institute. Though Dumont was offered fellowship positions as far away as California, he chose to remain in Toronto where his wife worked. Dumont and Anne -- a banker -- married nearly 20 years ago. Again Dumont sighs that he's glad his wife is in banking, "I have no aptitude for that," he said. He does have an aptitude in research and leads a team of researchers, who he credits as bright, dedicated people without whom he wouldn't have a research lab. In a life that seems like a textbook success story, Dumont admits his diagnosis of having lymphoma in 1996 came as a shock. "It was the year my son was born," he said. His son Christopher is now 10. His daughter, Jennifer, is eight. Dumont explains his lymphoma has been characterized as "not very aggressive," "low grade" or "indolent." See Cancer page 7 PREPARE FOR THE ROAD AHEAD. Next course: May 15th, Tuesday & Thursday Evenings (4 weeks) 6:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. May 26, 27 and June 2, 3, Sat. & Sun. 9:30 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. www.youngdrivers.com 905.845.7200 MTO APPROVED BEGINNER DRIVER EDUCATION COURSE PROVIDER