Today Canada’s genomics enterprise marks the landmark discovery of DNA’s double helix structure, published in Nature by James Watson and Francis Crick in April 1953. The discovery – arguably one of the most important of the 20th century – answered a fundamental mystery about how living organisms pass genetic instructions from generation to generation, and eventually enabled later researchers to understand the genetic code.

The Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer (IRIC) at the Université de Montréal (UdeM), in collaboration with the Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital’s Quebec Leukemia Cell Bank, recently achieved a significant breakthrough thanks to the laboratory growth of leukemic stem cells, which will speed up the development of new cancer drugs.