Aaron Watamaniuk, Clinical Manager; Christina Zeglinski, Nurse Practitioner; Joe Mader, Pharmacist; Monique Miller, Team Leader; and, Dr. John Blondal Hematologist.

A new oncology program at St. Joseph’s Health Centre is bringing specialized cancer treatment closer to home for Toronto patients. 

In the spring of 2026, St. Joseph’s launched the T-cell Engager therapy program, offering a unique immunotherapy option to patients with cancers like multiple myeloma. 

Historically only offered at large cancer centres in Canada, the advent of the T-cell Engager therapy program at St. Joseph’s marks an important moment for access to care at community hospitals. 

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“There are differences in terms of access to care for patients who live even just five kilometres away from a major cancer centre,” says Christina Zeglinski, an acute care nurse practitioner and one of the people who helped bring this treatment therapy to St. Joseph’s. 

“Being able to offer specialized care in a community hospital is very exciting, not only as a clinician and someone who has worked in oncology for 15 years, but patients as well.”

Multiple myeloma is an incurable cancer, but many patients are now living long-term with the disease. T-cell Engager therapy has shown promising results in patients whose disease has become unresponsive to other treatments.

T-cell Engager therapy works by helping a patients’ immune system attack cancerous cells that might otherwise be hard to find or defeat. The immune system relies on T-cells, a type of white blood cell, to find infected, abnormal or dangerous cells like cancer cells and destroy them. But cancer cells can be elusive, and a patients’ T-cells can’t always find them alone. The therapy specifically targets those T-cells, bringing them into contact with the cancer cells so they can attack. 

Unlike chemotherapy, where a drug or multiple drugs fight cancer cells directly, immunotherapy supports a patients’ own immune system to do the fighting. 

Zeglinski, who previously worked at a downtown cancer centre, says she noticed a growing need for community-based treatments as patient volumes increased. Being treated closer to home offers better quality of life, especially for cancer patients who are already having to process so much information and adapt to significant life changes, and so she started the process of bringing T-cell Engager therapy to the west end. 

Cancer centre staff are highly trained to be able to respond to rare but specific side effects that can come with immunotherapy, and Aaron Watamaniuk, Clinical Manager, says staff and physicians at St. Joseph worked hard to upskill and learn about the delivery of T-cell Engager therapy to ensure they were prepared for the first patient. 

“Sending people far away from home can be a barrier to treatment,” says Watamaniuk. “Anything we can do to support our patients and community and keep people close to home is really beneficial.”

There are two main phases to T-cell Engager therapy, the first being a seven-day inpatient “ramp up” when patients first begin treatment. From there, patients are discharged and can be treated through outpatient maintenance appointments. Until now, St. Joseph’s has been offering maintenance treatment but is expanding this month to offer inpatient ramp ups as well. 

Many patients have completed their ramp-up at St. Michael’s Hospital, which also offers T-cell Engager therapy, before transitioning to St. Joseph’s for maintenance. 

While currently focused on the treatment of multiple myeloma, T-cell Engager therapy also shows promise for other diseases like lymphoma and solid tumour cancers like lung and breast cancer. It has shown promising results in cancers where treatment options have often been limited, especially for patients with advanced disease. 

By Olivia Lavery

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