Torsten Nielsen

I am a clinician-scientist in the

Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and an affiliated member of the Department of Orthopaedics and the Department of Urologic Sciences at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, recently promoted to the rank of full professor. I am based at Vancouver General Hospital and at the British Columbia Cancer Agency, working out of the Division of Anatomical Pathology, the Genetic Pathology Evaluation Centre, and the Centre for Translational and Applied Genomics.

I am also Associate Director of UBC's combined MD/PhD program

, where I help to organize our seminar series for clinician-scientists. I contribute to the correlative sciences planning around cancer clinical trials for the Canadian NCIC-Clinical Trials Group and the U.S.-based Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology -- formerly CA L GB

25% of my time is devoted to clinical work: musculoskeletal pathology including diagnosis of connective tissue neoplasms in the province of British Columbia, weekly sarcoma treatment planning conferences, and teaching residents and medical students at UBC. The rest of my time is devoted to translational research into how molecular changes in cancer cells impact upon diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment response, and in developing new and clinically-practical molecular diagnostics and targeted therapies for human cancer (with a focus on breast cancer and sarcomas).

My active research encompasses two major areas. As co-director of the Genetic Pathology Evaluation Centre at Vancouver Hospital (working with my close colleagues David Huntsman and Blake Gilks) I lead several active tissue microarray and gene expression profiling projects. A common theme of my work is to make clinical sense out of results from breast cancer and sarcoma basic science investigations, and their translation into diagnostic and predictive tests. As an independent principal investigator, I direct my lab (here are pictures of my research team) in a research program to develop much-needed systemic treatments for sarcomas, particularly synovial sarcoma and myxoid liposarcoma, neoplasms most commonly occurring in the limbs of young adults, and to develop practical clinical tests for the intrinsic subtyping of breast cancer.

I have external grant support from the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research, the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, the Liddy Shriver Sarcoma Initiative LSSI logo

, the Canadian Cancer Society CCS logo

and the Terry Fox Research Institute

.
In breast cancer research, I have an active collaboration with Chuck Perou of UNC-Chapel Hill, Matthew Ellis of Washington University, and Phil Bernard of the University of Utah, working to translate breast cancer expression profiles into clinical tests using Nanostring technology. On behalf of the North American Breast Cancer Group and the Breast International Group, I am coordinating a study into the analytical reproducibility of Ki67 as a proliferation biomarker in breast cancer. I also direct an international team studying myxoid liposarcoma, with my work dissecting the molecular biology of several other sarcomas being done in collaboration with Michael Underhill at the UBC Biomedical Research Centre. My other close collaborators on active grants include BC Cancer Agency orthopaedic onologist Paul Clarkson and breast cancer medical oncologists Karen Gelmon and Stephen Chia, and McMaster University radiation oncologist Tim Whelan. Here is my publications list.

A Short Biography

I was born and raised in North Vancouver, British Columbia. I went to Handsworth Secondary School, then got my B.Sc. from the Department of Biochemistry at UBC in 1991. My wife Karen Nordquist, whom I married in 1992, has received a Master of Arts degree in Sociology from McGill; here are some pictures of my family. Our first daughter, Lindsay Anne Nielsen, was born August 18, 2000, and we have been blessed with a second daughter, Nicole Maya Nielsen, born June 30, 2003. We live in a wonderful house in North Vancouver.
In 1997, after six years of work, I completed the MD/PhD program at

McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. My Ph.D. thesis, "Human Origins of DNA Replication: identification, analysis and application," was completed at the McGill Cancer Centre, under the supervision of Gerald B. Price in the Division of Experimental Medicine. While at McGill, I also studied and published articles on the ethics of germline genetic manipulations and euthanasia. My residency training began in Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, with a rotating internship year, where I spent many nights on call at the Victoria General and Royal Jubilee hospitals -- sometimes even running the cardiac arrest team!

During my residency in the Pathology program at UBC, I was able to undertake extra research training in London (laser capture microdissection in the laboratory of Dr. Nick Lemoine), Stanford (microarrays, with Matt van de Rijn and Rob West) and Seattle (immunohistochemistry, with Allen Gown of PhenoPath labortories). In late 2001, David Huntsman, Blake Gilks and I founded the Genetic Pathology Evaluation Centre and we have remained close collaborators ever since. In 2002, I passed my exam and obtained a fellowship in Anatomic Pathology from the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, and I obtained subspecialty training in soft tissue pathology at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio and in bone pathology at the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital in Birmingham, England. I started my full time faculty position at UBC in January 2003, and was promoted to tenured Associate Professor in 2007 and to full Professor in July 2012.

Citations and abbreviated abstracts from my work in all these fields are available in my publications list.

Hobbies & Interests

Overworked city-people with an environmental ethic often end up

Urban Cyclists!

I have an active interest in peace and environmental issues; in fact, that's how Karen & I met!

Here are links to some organizations I support: Physicians for Global Survival, Medecins Sans Frontieres, and Autism Speaks

Escaping to nature was always easy, growing up in Vancouver, a city with many great places to go hiking.

Contact Information:
Torsten O. Nielsen, MD/PhD FRCPC
Anatomical Pathology, JP 1401
Vancouver Hospital & Health Sciences Centre
855 W. 12th Ave, Vancouver B.C. V5Z 1M9
tel: 604.875.4111 x66768 (clinical) or x62649 (research)
fax: 604.875.5707 (attn: T. Nielsen)
email address: torsten[nospam]@mail.ubc.ca
(remove [nospam] to reply)

Last modified 2013.1.16