# The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids)

Source: https://onco.cc/institutions/sickkids/  
OnCo record `sickkids` (Institution). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Canada's largest children's hospital, where brain tumour stem cells were first isolated and where the Li-Fraumeni surveillance protocol was developed.

## Summary

SickKids is Canada's largest paediatric hospital and a University of Toronto teaching site whose Garron Family Cancer Centre and Research Institute have an outsized record in paediatric oncology. Peter Dirks first isolated cancer stem cells from human brain tumours in 2003-04; Michael Taylor (now at Texas Children's) defined the four molecular subgroups of medulloblastoma; Cynthia Hawkins's group characterised H3K27M diffuse midline glioma. David Malkin and Uri Tabori developed the 'Toronto protocol' of whole-body MRI surveillance for Li-Fraumeni syndrome, now adopted internationally, and Tabori's international consortium showed hypermutant, replication-repair-deficient childhood cancers respond to checkpoint inhibitors. SickKids is a major Children's Oncology Group site with programmes in leukaemia, neuroblastoma and sarcoma.

## Fields

- Kind: Institution
- Last checked: 2026-09-09
- Also known as: SickKids; Garron Family Cancer Centre
- City: Toronto, ON, CA
- Type: hospital
- Website: https://www.sickkids.ca

## Sources

- SickKids: https://www.sickkids.ca
- Garron Family Cancer Centre: https://www.sickkids.ca/en/care-services/centres/garron-family-cancer-centre/

## Connected records

- cancers: [Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia](https://onco.cc/cancers/all-leukemia/), [Glioma & glioblastoma](https://onco.cc/cancers/glioblastoma/), [Medulloblastoma](https://onco.cc/cancers/medulloblastoma/), [Neuroblastoma (paediatric)](https://onco.cc/cancers/neuroblastoma/)
- technologies: [Germline (hereditary) testing](https://onco.cc/technologies/germline-testing/), [Immune checkpoint inhibitors](https://onco.cc/technologies/checkpoint-inhibitor/), [Whole-body MRI](https://onco.cc/technologies/whole-body-mri/)
- companies: [Children's Oncology Group (COG)](https://onco.cc/companies/childrens-oncology-group/)
- institutions: [Princess Margaret Cancer Centre](https://onco.cc/institutions/princess-margaret/), [Texas Children's Cancer and Hematology Center](https://onco.cc/institutions/texas-childrens/)
- terms: [Li-Fraumeni syndrome (germline TP53)](https://onco.cc/terms/li-fraumeni/)
- people: [Meredith Irwin](https://onco.cc/people/meredith-irwin/), [Ronald Cohn](https://onco.cc/people/ronald-cohn/), [Stephen Scherer](https://onco.cc/people/stephen-scherer/), [Sumit Gupta](https://onco.cc/people/sumit-gupta/)
- bottlenecks: [Inherited risk is mostly unidentified](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-hereditary-risk/), [Rare and paediatric cancers without markets](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-rare-cancers/)
- key papers: [Singh 2004: identification of human brain tumour initiating cells](https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-singh-brain-tumour-initiating-cells-nature-2004/)

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JSON: https://onco.cc/api/v1/entities/sickkids.json