New federal investment launches Phase II of the Marathon of Hope Cancer Centres Network, building on McGill's leadership in genomics, data science and personalized cancer care.

McGill University, the Rosalind and Morris Goodman Cancer Institute, the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre, the Jewish General Hospital and Lady Davis Institute, as well as partners across the Marathon of Hope Québec (MOHQ) Consortium, are proud to be part of the second phase of the Marathon of Hope Cancer Centres Network (MOHCCN) announced on September 24, 2026, by the Terry Fox Research Institute and the Government of Canada.

The MOHCCN is a pan-Canadian initiative launched in 2019 that is transforming cancer research and advancing precision oncology across Canada. Building on the achievements of Phase I, which concluded in March 2026, this renewed federal investment will strengthen capacity to develop and deliver personalized oncology for people with cancer across Canada and Québec.

"The Marathon of Hope Cancer Centres Network demonstrates what is possible when researchers, clinicians and institutions across Quebec and Canada work together toward a shared goal," said Dominique Bérubé, Vice-President, Research and Innovation. "McGill and its affiliated institutes and hospitals have made major contributions to the Network, and this renewed investment will allow us to build on the extraordinary expertise, data and infrastructure developed during the first phase, while accelerating discoveries and bringing the promise of precision oncology closer to more people living with cancer."

Since 2020, researchers and clinicians across the McGill community have played a leading role in advancing MOHCCN’s mission. Work done by McGill teams has contributed to the generation of large genomic and clinical datasets. The MOHQ has sequenced tumour and matched normal samples and shared this genomic and clinical data from over 4500 patients, with more than half of these cases contributed by McGill clinicians and researchers. The tumours sequenced spanned a range of cancer types including breast, lung, prostate, pancreatic and biliary, gastric, ovarian, colorectal, oral and skin cancers, lymphomas as well as rare cancers and rare cancer subtypes.

Investigators from the McGill community also led several pan-Canadian projects that brought together clinicians and researchers from across Canada to address specific questions that would have been difficult to address without inter-provincial collaboration.