Trucking entrepreneur Archie Verspeeten has contributed to the fight against Cancer. The founder of Ingersoll-based Verspeeten Cartage has donated $3-million towards funding a new treatment and research hub at London Health Science Centre. The new clinic will be dedicated to his late wife and son. The hub will help doctors to develop more treatments to patients with a focus on ones with cancer, based on their genes.
The donation will create the Archie and Irene Verspeeten Clinical Genome Centre. The clinic will combine research with patient care. The centre will help in treating patients with conditions or diseases that have connections with their genes. The centre will first prioritize cancer, but will also conduct research on epilepsy, neuromuscular disorder among other disabilities.
Using the latest genetic testing and sequencing technology, researchers and doctors will be able to predict with more accuracy, how a disease will progress and as a result develop personal
Archie Verspeeten, founder of Ingersoll’s Verspeeten Cartage, donates $3 million to the fight against cancer. The Archie and Irene Verspeeten Clinical Genome Centre will be created in honor of his late wife and son.
medicine plan for a patients. The cancer genomics will be integrated with LHSC’s clinics instead of being made into research labs.
Verspeeten said he is very proud to support the first-of-its-kind genome centre in the country, and said he hopes that his contributions will one day lead to a cure for cancer.
Verspeeten’s motivation for the donation and the new clinic are his son and his wife, who both lost the battle against the disease. His son Alan died in 2015 at the age of 56, and his wife Irene whom he was married for 66 years, passed away in 2017. In honor of them both, the centre will have a big focus on genomic sequencing for pancreatic cancer. This will be done in partnership with the Baker Centre for Pancreatic Cancer.
Verspeeten, who founded Verspeeten Cartage in 1953 with an $800 loan, makes a strong and humble appearance in the fight against this disease that has taken and continues to take millions of lives all around the globe.
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