"What if… we could detect cancer at the earliest stages, long before a patient or physician notices signs or symptoms?” To tackle this problem, in 2009, Sam and Don Listwin founded the Canary Center at Stanford, which focused solely on developing innovative strategies for the early detection of cancer.

Nature Biomed. Eng. 2021, 197

The Canary Center at the Stanford School of Medicine

The Canary Center was established in 2009 through an alliance between Don Listwin, founder of the Canary Foundation, and Dr. Sanjiv Sam Gambhir, Professor of Radiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. The Canary Center at Stanford is a world-class research facility dedicated to cancer early detection programs. Our foundational mission is to discover and implement minimally invasive diagnostic and imaging strategies for the detection and prognostication of cancers at early, curable stages. The Canary Center was the first in the world to integrate research on both in vivo and in vitro diagnostics to deliver these tests, by housing state-of-the-art facilities and collaborative research programs in molecular imaging, proteomics, chemistry, cell and molecular biology, and bioinformatics. These initiatives have extensive links to the Stanford Cancer Institute, forming a direct pipeline for translation of early cancer detection research into clinical trials and practice.