Professor April Khademi awarded $100K from Breast Cancer Canada

Congratulations to Professor April Khademi who was awarded $100K in funding from Breast Cancer Canada (BCC) in partnership with AstraZeneca Canada. The funding is part of BCC’s “Uncovering Predictive Markers and Mechanisms of Treatment Resistance in Advanced HR+ and HER2+ Breast Cancer” matched grants program. 

For Khademi, the Canada Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Medical Imaging, the funding will support her project titled “AI-driven tools to better assess risk and guide treatment decisions for patients with HER2-/HR+ breast cancer.” This research is part of her guiding mission to help researchers and clinicians better understand breast cancer to inform better treatment solutions. 

Training AI tools to improve patient outcomes

At Khademi’s TMU Image Analysis in Medicine Lab (IAMLAB), her team is developing AI-based tools to accurately predict a patient’s risk and likely response to different treatments. These tools have been developed to use several detection and segmentation techniques including identifying Ki-67, a protein biomarker for breast cancer. Using large multidata sets, the team is currently assessing how reliably the tools can grade and score breast cancer pathology images. In the near future, these tools will be used to help pathologists inform therapeutic decisions and develop customized care management plans – delivering the right treatment at the right time  and improving outcomes for patients.

Funding acknowledgement: This research is funded by Breast Cancer Canada (grant #AZ2025-010).

View the funding announcement on the Breast Cancer Canada website. (external link) 

Learn more about the IAMLAB at Toronto Metropolitan University.