Posted on January 23, 2013

Canadian Hospital Receives $50 Million Gift From Longtime Supporters

Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto has announced a ten-year, $50 million gift from broadcast mogul Allan Slaight and his wife, Emmanuelle Gattuso, in support of cancer research, the Globe and Mail reports.

The gift will support efforts by the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre to deliver truly personalized medicine and will be used to hire additional specialists to study how patients' cancer cells mutate, which could help oncologists make more precise diagnoses and lead to more effective treatment regimens for individual patients. Within five years, the hospital hopes to be able to examine all its patients' cancer cells and provide complete molecular descriptions of their tumors.

Made as part of the Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation's $1 billion campaign to support personalized medicine, the gift follows a $22 million gift from the couple in 2009 to establish a rapid diagnostic center to diagnose and offer treatment plans to breast cancer patients in a single day.

"Today, the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre takes a significant step towards conquering cancer in our lifetime," said PMC Foundation president and CEO Paul Alofs. "This gift literally is a game-changer for cancer research."