Cancer Care Ontario is taking the lead to establish a chronic disease prevention infrastructure in Ontario, with emphasis on cancer. Understanding risk factors that initiate or accelerate cancer and other chronic diseases is essential for developing effective and timely prevention strategies. To maximize the impact of emerging science, there is an urgent need for well-designed, large-scale, population-level prospective epidemiological studies that represent the diverse population, provincially and nationally.

With its partners, the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research and the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario, this program, “The Ontario Cohort Consortium” (OCC), will serve as a “legacy laboratory” of multidisciplinary scientists, expanding health research at both the molecular and population levels. The OCC will seek out and foster relationships with other chronic disease scientists and funders, which could also benefit from a large-scale platform. Ontario must be involved in this enterprise to remain globally competitive, to provide leadership, and to attract and sustain researchers with a commitment to scientific excellence. The research platform will be designed with infrastructure to address biospecimen, tumour banking, population-level and environmental exposure data collection systems, sufficiently diverse to reasonably accommodate other chronic disease groups and sufficiently flexible to reposition recruitment and collection strategies as needs may arise in the future.

Currently in Phase I – Development, having secured seed-funding from the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (www.oicr.on.ca), we are designing methodologies and defining operational parameters for a population-based cohort study. The group is in the process of defining a protocol and operational plan with anticipated completion in December 2007. Phase II – Implementation, the launch of the large-scale and long-term cohort platform across Ontario, is anticipated after January, 2008, following international peer-review.