It was only fitting that a cancer researcher pay a visit to his hometown of Gravenhurst just before the kickoff of cancer month and pay homage to the educators that helped him grow.

Dr. Ken Evans, a graduate of Gravenhurst High School, is the president and CEO of the Ontario Cancer Biomarker Networks (OCBN), a not-for-profit company dedicated to accelerating the discovery and development of early diagnostic and prognostic tools for cancer.

In this capacity, he leads the OCBN central research facility, which together with its integrated network of sister core laboratories, provides the necessary infrastructure to support multidisciplinary industry and academic biomarker discovery, qualification and validation research programs.

Evans is also the son of Janet Evans, a member of the Retired Women Teachers of Ontario, who invited the researcher to speak at a recent luncheon held at Muskoka Boat & Heritage Centre at Muskoka Wharf.

“It’s really great to see my teachers from the past,” Evans told the group of about 50 women. “So much of my academic career really came about from the experience I had. I really had a fantastic education in Gravenhurst that guided me in many ways in my future academic endeavours, so it’s really nice to be back here.”

“It’s really important to understand what is going on in science today in terms of medicine because everything is changing in an incredibly fast way,” he said. “One of the things leading the way is biomarker research, which is an entirely new concept in how we view medicine and the concept of personalized therapeutics. It means you will be treated as an individual for your particular version of the disease, not the disease that everybody gets.”

Evans said biomarkers are a fingerprint for a disease, and sometimes a specific biological marker will tell people the presence of a disease or the progress of a disease.

“Biomarkers are really all about diagnosis and early diagnosis,” he said. “With cancer that’s obviously a very good thing. The earlier you can predict someone is going to get the disease, the easier it will be to treat it.”

Evans explained treating the disease is also difficult in that the response rate for patients varies and there’s a percentage of the population that does not ever respond to medicine, though they all suffer from the same disease.

“Biomarkers change the medical practice from a population-based approach to an individualized approach,” he said.

In a state-of-the-art lab at the MaRS Incubator at MaRS Centre, OCBN co-ordinates the proteomic and genomic biomarker research efforts where they help people find and develop biomarkers, and prove they work, which leads to commercialization.

Compounding the problem is drug development, he said, noting there is a gap between discovery and commercialization when it comes to medication and drugs.

“The field is unbelievably complex,” he said. “It’s state-of-the-art and it takes expertise and money, but the technologies are available to give us the ability to improve treatment of the disease.”