Sudbury scientist secures $2M federal grant for cancer wastewater research

A Sudbury scientist is turning wastewater into a cancer-fighting tool. Using pandemic-era tracking technology. Amanda Hicks explains.

A Sudbury scientist and his team will receive $2 million in federal funding over five years for cancer prevention research.

Health Sciences North Research Institute researcher Dr. Gustavo Ybazata will use the funding for his CANCER-WISE (Cancer Associated Nucleic-acids in Community Environments: Risk detection through Wastewater-based Integrated Surveillance and Epidemiology) project, which will examine biological markers in wastewater.

“We have been working for more than four years with wastewater,” said Ybazeta.

“We were part of the big consortium that, was working during the pandemic to detection of, Covid-19. We began asking if we are if we are able to detect, biomarkers of cancer on the wastewater and if it can be useful and the information can be, allow us to understand what the dynamics of the cancer in our populations.”

In February, the Federal Minister of Health, along with leaders from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and United Health Network in Toronto announced more than $41 million towards basic science cancer prevention research.

Ybazeta’s team was one of 19 across Canada who received funding, receiving a twentieth of the total.

He was the only one to receive funding in northern Ontario.

“We have an historical problem with cancer, always has been, a major, problem here in our communities,” Ybazeta said.

“Part for the environment where we live is as being, most of the places we live over here can be related to mining. We have a problem with pollution. And this is another part that we are evaluating on this on this project is to, we’re evaluating the ecosystem, for example, presence of, heavy metals in wastewater and correlating these with, with different, cancers in our communities.”

James Knockleby is a research associate who is working on the project.

“I’m going to be looking at developing new tools and using existing tools to study off what diseases, what cancers are,” he said. “And we can determine it in the wastewater.”

Ybazeta’s team will collect and analyze wastewater samples from cancer centres and municipal water treatment facilities in Sudbury, Sault Ste. Marie and Thunder Bay.

“Understanding the differences between the cities in, northern Ontario, we know that there’s differences in wastewater,” Knockleby said.

“That will also be something that we have to consider, to understand how we interpret that, what we’re seeing and understanding, even though northern Ontario as a whole is sort of a large population, individual places are different.”

While the study is about to get underway, Knockleby told CTV News that he believes it’s important to give northern Ontario ‘a seat at the table.’

“I know that northern Ontario is unique and it needs to have a voice, as well in understanding health care here,” he said.

“Also, we can be part of the national conversation.”

More on the research can be found here.

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