TORONTO — The annual gala that raises funds for the Gerry & Nancy Pencer Brain Tumour Centre at the Princess Margaret Hospital will be held this year on May 26 at the Liberty Grand Entertainment Complex.
The centre was founded by the late businessman Gerry Pencer, who was diagnosed with a brain tumour 12 years ago.
Holly Pencer Bellman, Pencer’s daughter and executive director of the centre, said that when her father was diagnosed, there wasn’t a consolidated treatment facility.
“Surgery was in one place and treatment in another. If we needed information or support, we went somewhere else,” Pencer Bellman said.
Her father decided he would change that, she said, and before he died, he pledged $4 million to Princess Margaret Hospital to start the centre.
Pencer Bellman said her father was involved in creating the centre, and “it is exactly his vision. He’s all around it.”
The largest of its kind in Canada, the centre is 5,700 square feet and takes up half of the 18th floor of the hospital.
“The Pencer Centre has blossomed into the leading multi-disciplinary facility of its kind in North America, regularly held up as a model for similar organizations the world over,” she said.
“Not only a state of the art treatment and research facility, it’s home to 5,200 patients and their families each year. It’s a place where patients can visit with their families, participate in workshops, hang out and have coffee with a friend, talk to a [therapist] or relax in the library with a book.”
The Pencer Centre has also developed an international reputation as a significant contributor to leading-edge research, she added.
“Ongoing studies conducted at the Pencer Centre have led to the establishment of a new standard of care for patients, like [my father] who are diagnosed each year with the most aggressive type of brain tumour.
“Not only is this new treatment protocol extending the life of patients, but it has also stimulated the explosion of interest in expanding the limits of conventional treatments as well as exploring novel treatments for other brain tumours,” Pencer Bellman said.
For information on the gala, call 416-923-2999 or visit http://www.pencerbraintrust.com.
