When John-Peter Bradford’s wife was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 2013, he did everything possible to get treatment that might extend her life. Read MoreJohn-Peter Bradford co-founded the Ottawa-based non-profit Life-Saving Therapies Network to quicken Canada’s sluggish drug approval system.
John-Peter Bradford co-founded the Ottawa-based non-profit Life-Saving Therapies Network to quicken Canada’s sluggish drug approval system.
Article content
When John-Peter Bradford’s wife was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 2013, he did everything possible to get treatment that might extend her life.
Article content
Doctors had given Anne Bachinski-Bradford just a few weeks to live, but armed with a self-described gift for pushiness and some contacts, the Ottawa entrepreneur helped her get special access to experimental drugs that enabled her to live more than a year. She lived to see her daughter get married.
Article content
Article content
Story continues below
Article content
“It became my full-time job. It was all I did,” says Bradford, himself a cancer survivor.
Article content
The Evening Citizen
Article content
Before she died, Bachinski-Bradford told her husband she thought it was unfair that she was the only one benefiting from his advocacy.
Article content
Bradford took that to heart.
Article content
Just before her death, he teamed up with Dr. David Stewart, his wife’s medical oncologist, to create the Ottawa-based non-profit Life-Saving Therapies Network (LSTN), which has become a national voice in the push for faster access to better treatments for patients with lethal diseases like cancer and ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis).
Article content
It is a cause for which Stewart has long advocated. In 2022, he published a book titled “Why Cancer Still Sucks, and So Does Access to Treatment in Canada”. Among other things, he writes that a “procedural and regulatory swamp” slows progress, shortens the lives of cancer patients and drives up the cost of cancer therapies at a time when researchers are making “tremendous progress”.
Article content
Story continues below
Article content
Stewart said he sees patients every day who could benefit from treatments that are not yet available in Canada.
Article content
“We have all these great new drugs that we can’t access. It is very frustrating. That is what drives me to keep working on it.”
Article content
He and Bradford are not alone. Increasingly, oncologists, advocates and patient groups are speaking up about slow access to new treatments in Canada. And politicians are starting to notice.
Article content
Ontario Premier Doug Ford, as head of the Council of the Federation, is among the voices who have pushed for faster approval of drugs.
Article content
“We owe it to Canadians to do everything we can to give them the same timely access to life-changing treatments as patients in the rest of the world,” he said in 2024.
Article content
In the most recent federal election, the Liberal Party promised to “significantly reduce wait times for life-saving medications”. Bradford says it is well past time for this and other promises to be kept.