Memories, music, and medical breakthroughs

“No one dies of cancer in their breast,” Dr. Sunit Das says. “You can survive without breasts. You die because your cancer metastasizes: to the lungs, to the liver, to the brain.”  

He says this matter-of-factly, because understanding the phenomena that have killed countless people around the world is the first step to doing something about it. 

Dr. Das is a neurosurgeon and scientist at St. Michael’s Hospital where he holds the Keenan Chair in Surgery. He is also an associate professor of surgery at the University of Toronto, and the provincial lead for central nervous system oncology at Cancer Care Ontario. 

For decades, Dr. Das has operated on women whose breast cancer had been beaten everywhere else in the body—until it appeared in the brain. 

“Brain metastases from breast cancer don’t behave like the original tumour,” Dr. Das says. “And the tools available to treat them haven’t changed in decades. We have surgical resection and radiation therapy. But they’re both local therapies,” he says, adding that these options are often too late for patients by the time the cancer metastasizes to the brain. 

Dr. Das didn’t set out to study breast cancer. He is a surgeon of gliomas, cancers that originate inside the brain itself. That work alone has occupied much of his career. Breast cancer entered his lab sideways and through repetition, the same pattern recurring case after case: a disease controlled in the breast and the body, and then resurgent in the skull.  

“I kept operating on these patients, so many of them women,” Dr. Das says. “And I kept asking the same questions: ‘Why is this happening, and what can I do about it?’ Eventually, these questions became impossible for me to ignore.”  

But, as Dr. Das notes, these are not the type of questions that government grants reward. In today’s challenging medical funding landscape, turning a clinical observation into a research program is not straightforward, he says, particularly when the observation takes you outside the field in which you built your reputation. 

Research granting organizations say they don’t want incremental science. Still, they also want precedent before they back a new direction, Dr. Das says, adding: “The reality is that everything has to be incremental, because you have to show that you’ve done something like it before.” And so, for years, Dr. Das’ questions went unanswered. 

What changed everything for his lab was winning the inaugural Sarah McComb Award for Cancer Research in 2023, giving him $150,000 in annual catalyst funding toward his research. 

The award is funded by Rock with Love, a concert held each November at the Opera House in memory of Sarah McComb, a former breast cancer patient at St. Mike’s. Rock with Love is a tribute to Sarah’s love of music, but also to her enduring spirit. She was a woman who surrounded herself with people, radiated joy, and always made room for one more person at the table. The concert is now a beloved community gathering each year that turns music into breakthroughs in cancer research.

The winner of the award, a top scientist at St. Mike’s, is announced each year at Angels Den, Canada’s biggest medical research competition. 

For the past four years, hundreds have attended Rock with Love. In 2025, the concert raised more than $350,000 on its own, and since 2022, Rock with Love has raised more than $1.1 million, funded 15 trainees, and backed three research projects focused on brain metastasis, targeted radiation therapy, and next-generation immunotherapy. 

The award is, in Dr. Das’s words, “the kind of funding our system doesn’t typically allow,” and supports a new direction rather than an extension of an existing one.  

“We applied for so many grants,” he says of the years before he won this award. “What the Sarah McComb Award did was give me the room to pursue a question with no guaranteed answer.” 

The work split his research into two tracks. One track examined human tissue directly: the team profiled 28 breast cancer brain metastases. It combined that data with The Cancer Genome Atlas to understand how metastases differ from the primary breast tumours they originated from.  

The other track looked at the broader picture, running population-based studies to measure how often brain metastasis occurs across the three major subtypes of breast cancer (hormone receptor–positive, HER2-positive, and triple-negative) to understand not just whether patients are at risk, but which patients are most at risk, and when. 

The central question was whether breast tumours that spread to the brain early are biologically different from those that take years to reach the brain. They are, Dr. Das found. In women whose cancer reached the brain quickly, the genes activating inside the tumour had nothing to do with cancer. They were genes associated with brain development, machinery that is normally only switched on in a growing embryo.  

The lab has since developed a machine learning algorithm, built from this work, that predicts a patient’s risk of developing brain metastasis, research that earned the Best Clinical/Translational Abstract Award at the Canadian Neuro-Oncology meeting.  

The next steps are already mapped out: finishing the genetic analysis of what drives the spread, completing the subtype-specific population studies, and using an animal model to begin testing new therapies. 

“If we could have a consistent therapy given to patients who are at high risk of developing brain metastasis, before they develop it, that would be life-changing for so many,” Dr. Das says. 

Dr. Das is clear about where the credit for his discoveries belongs. The research only exists because a community shows up every November to a concert at the Opera House in Sarah’s memory, he says. 

“The only reason I was able to do any of this was because of the Sarah McComb Award,” he says. “This award gave me the catalyst I needed to generate the kind of data that will let us attract larger funding down the road. And that support came entirely from the Rock with Love community. I’m so very grateful.”

The Rock with Love concert returns on November 7, 2026—one night, one community, and another powerful push against cancer in memory of Sarah McComb. Mark your calendar and follow @rockwithlove1 for info and updates.