John E. Dick

Biosketch

John E. Dick, PhD is Senior Scientist and Helga and Antonio DeGasperis Chair in Blood Cancer Stem Cell Research at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University Health Network in Toronto, and Professor of Molecular Genetics and University Professor at the University of Toronto. He first trained as an X-ray technologist at Red River Community College, Winnipeg and then completed his BSc in Microbiology from the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. He undertook post-doctoral research on stem cell gene transfer with Alan Bernstein at the Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto. He joined the Dept of Medical Genetics at the Hospital for Sick Children in 1986 and moved to the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in 2001. He has been internationally recognized with more than 30 major awards including election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada; Royal Society of London, UK; AACR Academy and an International Member of the US National Academy of Medicine and National Academy of Science along with numerous prestigious awards including the Dameshek, Thomas and Mentor Prizes (from American Society of Hematology), the Clowes, AACR-Pezcoller, and Outstanding Achievement in Blood Cancer Research Awards (from the American Association for Cancer Research), the Tobias and Innovation Awards (from the International Society for Stem Cell Research), the 2017 Keio Medical Science Prize, and the 2022 Canada-Gairdner International Award. He was inducted to the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame in 2024.

Research Interests

Dr. Dick has longstanding interest in understanding what makes a stem cell a stem cell and how does it go bad in cancer. He developed the widely used xenograft systems now used to assay normal and leukemic human blood stem cells thereby transforming the study of human hematopoiesis and leukemia. His landmark papers first identifying leukemia stem cells (LSC) are recognized as altering our understanding of cancer biology and initiating the modern era of cancer stem cell (CSC) research. He isolated HSC in their purist form and is currently deploying single cell gene expression, epigenetic and proteomic analyses to human HSC obtained from fetal, neonatal and adult sources. This work provides molecular insight into the discrete properties of HSC across ontogeny and of HSC as they change with aging. Since his work has also defined HSC as a cellular origin of blood malignancies, these HSC studies set the stage to understand the pre- malignant phase of human disease. Current studies are linking HSC biology with inflammation, aging and leukemic transformation opening a foundation to consider targeting the pre-malignant phase to prevent leukemia development. Parallel multiomic studies undertaken in human leukemia at single cell resolution are uncovering leukemia as a perturbed caricature of normal hematopoietic developmental states. Defining these states begins to explain the extreme heterogeneity in leukemia and the variable response to therapy. The new hierarchical classification system being developed is aimed at building better clinical approaches for therapeutic targeting.