Profile

Jacques Simard is currently Vice-Dean of Research and Innovation at the Faculty of Medicine at Université Laval, Professor for the Department of Molecular Medicine and since 1990, a Scientist at the CHU de Québec - Université Laval Research Center. He was the chairholder of Canada Research Chair in Oncogenetics (2001-2022). Professor Simard's research focuses on the genetic susceptibility of hormone-dependent cancers, including breast, ovarian, and prostate cancer.

From 2001 to 2013, Professor Simard was Director of the CIHR-funded Interdisciplinary Health Research International Team on Breast Cancer Susceptibility (INHERIT BRCAs) guided by open science principles. This team brought together more than twenty-five molecular geneticists, epidemiologists, biostatisticians, clinicians, and ethicists from North America and Europe. Their collective know-how is at the origin of numerous translational research projects in personalized medicine. He also possesses a genuine interest in the social, ethical and legal issues related to personalized health care.

Thereafter, he was the Principal Investigator of two large-scale international projects funded by the CIHR/Genome Canada/Genome Québec/Quebec Breast Cancer Foundation and other partners, entitled Personalized Risk Stratification for Prevention and Early Detection of Breast Cancer (PERSPECTIVE, 2013-2018), and PERSPECTIVE: Integration and Implementation (PERSPECTIVE I&I; 2018-2024). PERSPECTIVE was designed to develop the tools needed to implement a risk stratification approach to tailor breast cancer screening depending on an individual's risk, thus helping to determine the age at which they are first invited for screening or how regularly they are invited to receive it, with the use of the best adapted imaging modalities. One of the major goals of PERSPECTIVE I&I is to evaluate risk stratification tools developed by this team to generate real-world evidence on feasibility, acceptability, uptake, cost-effectiveness, organizational readiness as well as socio-ethical and legal issues, in order to determine the optimal implementation approaches to improve the breast cancer screening program in the Canadian health system.

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