My name is Aqsa and I work in the clinical genome interpretation team at OICR generating clinical reports for cancer patients.
My father was diagnosed with glioblastoma at age 50 and passed away at 51. And my sister was diagnosed with colon cancer at age 17 and passed away at 20.
At that time, I was 12. Because of the early stage onset of cancer for my sister and the cancer history in my family, my sister was recommended for genetic testing.
Fifteen years ago, the word genetic testing was huge and scary, and my family didn’t know what it entailed. We received a genomic report that was hieroglyphics to us, despite my mom’s best attempts to go through it with a genetic counselor.
Fifteen years later, I came across that genomic report again, and I was surprised that — with my newfound genomic knowledge — words like ‘Lynch Syndrome’ and ‘microsatellite instability’ and ‘TP53’, which I use in my daily lexicon at work, suddenly became understandable in a way that they weren’t when I was 12.
So, for the first time, I was able to shed some light on the scientific terminology in that report for my mother. After 15 years, she finally saw that report as not hieroglyphics, but as something that was grounded in reality.
What I’ve learned is it’s not the genomic knowledge that’s the most important thing when talking to people about cancer research, but it’s the fact that I can let people not be alone in their fears.
Aqsa Alam is a bioinformatician in the Clinical Genome Interpretation team at the Ontario Institute of Cancer Research. Aqsa did her Honours BSc with high distinction in Biology and Physics at the University of Toronto Mississauga and her MSc in Cell and Systems Biology at the University of Toronto. Aqsa is passionate about scientific outreach, and currently volunteers as an organizer for TorBUG, a bioinformatics community group which hosts bioinformatics speakers monthly in downtown Toronto. In her free time, Aqsa likes to draw Dragon Ball Z characters, paint animals and landscapes, swim, and build really tall card towers.