GenTrac Genomics Projects Include Saskatchewan-based Precision Oncology Platform

Genome Prairie’s GenTrac Initiative is a four-year, $4 million regional funding initiative to encourage collaborations between for-profit organizations in Manitoba or Saskatchewan and academic researchers. The GenTrac Initiative funding provides matching funding to established enterprises interested in developing an idea or research into a commercial application.

Genome Prairie has announced funding for three new projects aimed at developing genomics-based innovations for commercialization, including one Saskatchewan health-related enterprise.

Saskatchewan Health Research Foundation (SHRF) is proud to partner with OncoForma on the GenTrac Initiative to fund their development of approaches to advance personalized medicine for cancer treatments, focusing on how therapies impact the growth of individual cancers. OncoForma’s innovation focuses on providing better tools for cancer treatment plans, drug discovery, and testing.

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Funding Recipients:

OncoForma: A Functional Precision Oncology Platform to End the Guesswork in Cancer Treatment

Receptor Lead: Roshan Thomas (OnfoForma Technologies)

Scientific Lead: Andrew Freywald (University of Saskatchewan)

Project Value: $1.09M

Project Overview

Even among patients with the same diagnosis, cancers can be different from person to person and can respond very differently to the recommended chemotherapy. Yet treatment decisions are still based on what works for the average patient with, for example, pancreatic cancer, not what works for this patient with this particular pancreatic cancer.

Each year in Saskatchewan, hundreds of patients with cancer and their treatment teams face this challenge.

To make treatment selection for individual patients more reliable, OncoForma, in collaboration with researchers and clinicians at the College of Medicine, University of Saskatchewan, is now developing a new strategy. Samples of a patient’s tumour will be grown in the lab into tiny test organs (“organoids”) and divided into over 1,000 individual test chambers. each containing a different currently available drug. By observing which drugs kill the cancer organoids, doctors can identify treatments more likely to work in that patient. OncoForma’s innovative approach may offer patients a higher probability of treatment success by ensuring that the chemotherapy is matched to their unique cancer, not the average cancer.

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More information on the investment by Genome Prairie and partners, including SHRF via its GenTrac Initiative, can be found at https://genomeprairie.ca/gentrac_new_projects_2026/