OTTAWA — For Dr. Aaron Schimmer, the awards just keep on coming.

At the recent annual meeting in Ottawa of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, he received the Gold Medal in Medicine, which recognizes original research conducted by a physician in the first 10 years of his or her practice.

In a relatively short number of years in practice, Schimmer – a cancer researcher at Toronto’s Princess Margaret Hospital and a 1987 graduate of the Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto – has amassed a steady stream of awards and honours, including a listing last year as one of Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 – from Caldwell Partners, a national search firm – and recently being named a scholar in clinical research by the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of America.

And Schimmer, who holds five patents for new cancer treatments, is still – just barely – under 40.

“It was quite an honour to receive the award, considering that past recipients include many illustrious Canadian physician-scholars,” Schimmer said of the Ottawa ceremony, which was attended by his wife, Ettie, and their two children, and was also the convocation for new specialists in medicine and surgery.

“The evening was certainly filled with much pomp and ceremony. The platform party, of which I was a member, was dressed in full academic robes in the colours of the universities we graduated from, and we were led into and out of the ceremony accompanied by a bagpiper.”

Schimmer received the gold medal for his research identifying a protein called FLIP, which can be found at higher levels in cancer cells and allows them to metastasize, and he was also recognized for his drug research.

“The [FLIP] discovery was a team effort and included work done by six individuals in my lab, as well as collaborators at Princess Margaret and centres in the United States,” Schimmer said.

“I think this work, like the other projects in my lab, demonstrate how important breakthroughs in medical research can be achieved by bringing together scientists from diverse backgrounds, including molecular biology, chemistry, clinical medicine and imaging. Together we can make contributions that exceed what an individual or a single laboratory can accomplish.”

Because it takes many years for a new drug to progress from the lab to being used in a clinic and investigating its effectiveness on humans, Schimmer and his colleagues have been working on identifying older drugs that have been approved for other purposes, but may also have previously unrecognized anti-cancer effects.

Clinical trials with these “repurposed drugs” can be launched within two years of discovering such attributes, as opposed to more than 10 years for new drugs.

“One of the drugs we identified is ciclopirox olamine. It’s currently used for the treatment of topical fungal infections. We demonstrated that it kills cancer cells and shrinks tumours in mouse models of cancer,” Schimmer said.

“With the aid of the Leukemia Lymphoma Society of America and Kansas University, we are creating an oral version of this drug. Clinical trials with the oral version of the drug should be starting at Princess Margaret Hospital in the middle of 2009. The initial trials will be conducted in patients with blood cancer for which other treatments have not worked.”