Cancer patients to be offered genomic testing as part of a joint study with U.S. hospitals

Over the next five years, every patient treated at Canada’s largest cancer centre will have the opportunity to undergo genomic testing to see if major hereditary health risks lurk in their DNA.

The Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto announced Thursday that it would become the first Canadian hospital to join a cross-border collaboration involving 15 hospitals in the United States and Helix, Inc., a private American genomics company, that together plan to sequence the exomes of 1.6 million patients.