When questions become purpose
How diverse are ovarian cancers? Why do some tumours develop treatment resistance? Can we create more personalized care for patients? These are some of the guiding questions behind Professor David Cook’s research.
“Sometimes I feel like a professional daydreamer,” he says. “I just get to think about what the most exciting questions are, and then build a lab around chasing the answers that could actually change things for patients.”
Though always a dreamer, he didn’t always seem destined to become a scientist. As a teenager, Cook was more focused on playing guitar in his emo band than on schoolwork. His interest in medicine and health sciences emerged gradually, sparked unexpectedly by medical TV dramas.
From there, his curiosity for research grew when a professor, Dr. Barbara Vanderhyden suggested he join her lab for his fourth-year honours project.
“I remember walking into the lab the first day and falling in love with it,” he recalls.
“It was a cool feeling to know that you’re going to work every day to answer questions no one else has the answers to, and that sometimes, even for a moment, you’re the only person to know something.”
David Cook
— Professor at the Faculty of Medicine
Today, Cook is an assistant professor at the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Ottawa and a scientist studying cancer therapeutics at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute. He received the prestigious 2025 Polanyi Prize in Physiology and Medicine, awarded by the Government of Ontario to exceptional early-career researchers.
From dream to action
During his first week in the lab, Cook attended World Ovarian Cancer Day in Ottawa, an event that changed the trajectory of his career. Seeing the faces behind the disease made the science personal. He knew he wanted his work to matter for these women.
After completing postdoctoral work on colorectal cancer and inflammatory bowel disease with Dr. Jeff Wrana at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Cook returned to gynecological research with an expanded range of tools, techniques, and perspectives. Now based at the Cancer Centre at The Ottawa Hospital, he is reminded daily of the urgency of his work.
“I see patients in the waiting room — some are heading for chemotherapy, others bracing for the worst news of their lives. They’re the ones who drive me. They remind me why we do this.”
David Cook
— Professor at the Faculty of Medicine
In 2024, he founded the Cook Lab, a space where he and his team design experiments, collect samples and extract the data needed to answer their big questions. Every sample they collect, every dataset they generate, and every experiment they design are in the service of a singular goal: to understand disease well enough to change outcomes.
Making sense of therapy resistance
Cancer begins when normal cells acquire mutations, often due to carcinogens or simple errors in cell division. The conventional view of therapy resistance is straightforward: as tumours grow, some cells randomly pick up additional mutations that make them resistant to treatment. Chemotherapy kills the rest, but those rare resistant cells survive and can linger unnoticed, sometimes for years, before growing back into recurring, harder‑to‑treat tumours.
But Cook believes this model is incomplete. New evidence suggests that cancer cells can actively adapt to selective pressures, like chemotherapy or the body’s own anti-tumour immune response, developing strategies to evade them in real time. This phenomenon, known as cellular plasticity, raises critical questions: if resistance is not predetermined but instead forms during therapy, can we intervene early enough to block that process and make treatments more effective?
For Cook, these questions are central. Understanding therapy resistance is a path not just to treating recurrence, but to preventing it altogether.
A new question: endometriosis
Beyond cancer, Cook has turned his attention to another urgent and often overlooked condition: endometriosis. Affecting one in ten women, it typically takes seven-to-ten years to diagnose and treatment options are limited to surgery or hormonal therapies that can affect fertility.
Much of the expertise developed in cancer research can be repurposed to treat endometriosis. Can immunotherapies or other cancer‑based approaches be adapted for non‑malignant diseases? Cook thinks so. Thanks to a collaboration with Dr. Sukhbir Singh, he has gained deeper insight into the condition. Together, they launched the first endometriosis biobank at The Ottawa Hospital, an essential building block for future discoveries.
Collecting samples to build the biobank step-by-step
The process begins when a patient is scheduled for surgery. Dr. Singh’s team contacts them to explain the biobank, answer questions and obtain consent. If the patient agrees, Cook’s team processes lesion, blood and tissue samples.
Early in 2026, they recruited their first participant and successfully retrieved her samples for their biobank — an important milestone towards building a comprehensive research resource.
Powered by patients
Working directly with engaged patients adds a deeply human dimension to Cook's work. One patient stands out in his memory — a woman who faced years of infertility, a delayed diagnosis and one of the rare and devastating cases in which endometriosis progressed to ovarian cancer.
Despite everything, she became a passionate advocate for research on endometriosis and women’s health, donating her tissue and data to support the research and eventually joining the team as a patient partner.
Professional daydreamer
David Cook dreams big, but he is driven by purpose. Winning the Polanyi Prize is a milestone, not a finish line. He will keep asking the important questions, always remembering who this work is for.
“Progress in the lab must be matched by awareness in the world, so that more women receive faster diagnoses, better options, and real hope,” he says. “Dreaming sparks discovery, but awareness turns it into action.”
