The University of Calgary, the Alberta Children’s Hospital Foundation and the Alberta Cancer Foundation are pleased to announce a $25-million donation from the Riddell family in support of cancer immunotherapy and advancing the goal of making Calgary home to one of the best cancer centres in the world.

This transformative gift will establish the Riddell Centre for Cancer Immunotherapy, helping to reduce the burden of cancer in children, adolescents, and adults and improve patient survival through the rapid development and implementation of safe and effective precision cell and immune therapies for cancer.

More importantly, it will bring hope and healing to those who have no other treatment options.

“Immunotherapy enables us to re-engineer a patient’s own immune cells to recognize and attack their cancer cells,” said Dr. Douglas Mahoney, PhD, associate professor at the Cumming
School of Medicine and director of the Riddell Centre. “It gives hope to children and adults who don’t respond to conventional treatments, including rare and hard-to-treat cancers.”

These precision cell therapies will also be used to test and treat other treatment-resistant solid tumours – making the Riddell Centre one of the first in Canada to trial this approach.

“We are grateful to the Riddell family for their history of generous support for world-leading care and research to improve health outcomes for children and youth in our community and around the world,” says Saifa Koonar, President and CEO of the Alberta Children’s Hospital Foundation. “This remarkable investment is a gift of hope to families walking unthinkable cancer journeys with their children.”

Alberta is well positioned within a growing immunotherapy and cellular therapy landscape in Canada, thanks to an interdisciplinary network of specialized researchers and clinicians at the University of Calgary – and early provincial investments in clinical trials and clinical data infrastructure that make these advancements possible. The generosity of donors like the Riddell family help accelerate the impact that cellular therapy can have on Albertans and Canadians facing cancer.

“Immunotherapy may represent the most significant progress in reversing treatment-resistant cancers in decades. And it’s happening right here, in Alberta,” says Wendy Beauchesne, CEO of the Alberta Cancer Foundation. “This means we can provide early access to the most advanced experimental cancer treatments for Alberta patients – which is an incredible gift indeed.”

This gift also puts the OWN.CANCER campaign even closer to its goal of raising $250 million to help advance care and research at Calgary’s new Arthur J.E. Child Comprehensive Cancer Centre – the largest centre of its kind in Canada. When it opens in 2024, the 1.3 million square foot building will offer world-leading cancer care, research and education, together under one roof.