HERE is Where Cancer Meets its Match

Cancer hits close to home. Care should too.

When you hear the words “you have cancer,” life is never the same. For Jamie, it meant weeks of grueling chemotherapy and challenging surgery, TWICE. For Melanie, it meant facing daily radiation treatments and surgery after a whirlwind breast cancer diagnosis. For both, it meant having Southlake’s Regional Cancer Centre at Southlake here in their community, so they could stay close to what mattered most: home.

Since its inception, the Regional Cancer Centre has committed to making here the absolute best place to diagnose, treat, and survive cancer. Combining an academic hospital system’s expertise and care options with deep community connections, we balance leading-edge treatment with patient-centred care. Consistently ranked in the top three of Ontario’s 14 Cancer Centres, Southlake was recently named the first partner of the Princess Margaret Cancer Care Network.

HERE is where Cancer meets its match.

Our Campaign

Southlake’s Regional Cancer Centre has served our communities with distinction for over a decade. However, with our population expanding and aging at rapid rate, demand for care is increasing like never before. We must grow our capacity to minimize wait times because for cancer care, time is of the essence. We must also keep up with technological advances—we cannot face tomorrow’s challenges with yesterday’s methods in the fight against cancer. We face a tipping point and we need your help.

We have launched, HERE is Where Cancer Meets its Match to expand our spaces, build new capacity and bring the latest technology to the Cancer Centre to ensure our talented clinicians can deliver the best care—and the best chance for our patients to survive their cancer—right here. With the investment of our community, we can keep care close to home.

Our Goal

With the generous support of our community, we have raised over $19M in support of our Regional Cancer Centre!

Your thoughtful investment in the HERE is Where Cancer Meets its Match Campaign will help us:

• Bring Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) to support molecular medicine for patients at Southlake. NGS leverages innovative laboratory technology that looks at the genes that make up an individual’s cancer and helps to define specific treatments that particular cancer may respond to best. Currently, these tests must be sent to large academic hospitals in downtown Toronto for evaluation, meaning that patients may wait several weeks before they receive their results. With NGS testing on-site, Southlake patients could expect their results, significantly earlier, with target average of within seven days, leading to more personalized treatment plans for patients.




• Enable more advanced, minimally invasive procedures in the Thoracic Surgery Program. Many procedures performed in the thoracic surgery program relate to thoracic surgical oncology, specifically treating patients with lung and esophageal cancers. Thoracic surgery has undergone significant modernization with the development of increasingly minimally invasive procedures, which means better diagnostic image quality, more efficient patient flow, and superior patient experiences and outcomes with less discomfort and recovery time.

Southlake is Creating the Cancer Care You Deserve

We see a tomorrow where the demand for leading edge cancer care is greater than ever before. Facing this challenge requires not only expanding our capacity to deliver care, but introducing new advanced technology to transform care. Ultimately, our goal is to ensure that every patient—like Jamie, Melanie, Alyssa, Bill and Elizabeth—when facing the battle of their lives, exhausted, anxious and ill, never have to travel to access the leading edge cancer care they need.

We know that cancer hits close to home. Care should too.