When Dr. Zaid Taha was a young boy, he was a passionate artist. While he’s not painting gallery pieces today, he is painting cancer cells to make them more detectable by the immune system. He’s making cancer research look like an art form unto itself.
The postdoctoral fellow at The Ottawa Hospital conducts research in cancer immunotherapy by using viruses, vaccines, and more to activate patients’ own immune systems to fight cancer. As the 2026 Worton Researcher in Training Award recipient, today, his research is in the lab, but tomorrow, his research has the potential to bring more options to more patients, changing outcomes for those with cancer.
Learn more about the fascinating science behind Dr. Taha’s research, why he chose to come to Canada, and where you can find him outside of work.
I was born and raised in Amman, Jordan, where the Dead Sea and Petra are. It’s a really beautiful place. I grew up there as an only child, so you could say I had too much attention from my parents and my family, but I had a lot of cousins.
Surprisingly, and no one I tell now will believe me, but I excelled in visual arts. And not just painting or colouring, but all sorts of things like clay and woodwork.
My grandfather was a lawyer and then a judge. I always thought I’d want to follow in his steps, but that was just because I thought he was really cool. Then I thought I might be a scientist, and lo and behold, I followed that path.
I spent some time in Ottawa for a very short period of my childhood, and I’m very close to some of the cousins on my mother’s side of the family who came to Canada to go to university here. I always heard about their time in Ottawa, and I loved the idea of visiting to see it for myself, and to also experience the cold and the snow, because we don’t have much of a winter back in Jordan. There are also amazing university programs and research initiatives here in Ottawa, which is what really drew me to pursue my studies here.
When high school came around and things started to feel more real, I started falling in love with chemistry, and I thought I’d be a chemist. Then biology started to interest me.
I originally went into life sciences at Queens University with a specialization in drug development and toxicology because I wanted to keep the doors open. I thought I might go to med school or go into pharmacy.
“The whole idea of tackling the fear of the unknown appealed.”
— Dr. Zaid Taha
Originally, I wanted to stay away from cancer research, because I’ve lost so many people to cancer. It was almost a taboo thing to talk about. But doing courses in cell biology and learning how everything that is responsible for making a cell normal is also responsible for making to it abnormal and become a cancer cell just drew me into it. The whole idea of tackling the fear of the unknown appealed.
From there, I went into a master’s in cancer biology, where I learned that cancer research is incredibly challenging but also incredibly enriching; every day you learn something different and new. It’s emotionally taxing but very exciting. It’s a very dynamic field to study. There are literally people across every continent actively working on completely out-of-the-box ideas to try and address this healthcare burden and cultural burden. Eventually I made it to uOttawa and The Ottawa Hospital for my PhD and post-doc, gradually becoming more and more specialized in my research.
I define my research program as cancer agnostic, which means it’s not tied to one specific cancer.
I don’t study how cancer develops, I develop therapies that are broadly anti-cancer and can be applied to different cancers. The work I do looks for weaknesses within cancer and then targets those weaknesses.
I look mostly at carcinomas, which are solid tumour cancers. I do have cancers I tend to investigate more, though, and those are colorectal cancers (which are increasing in incidence in younger adults), breast cancers (which are very high incidence), pancreatic cancer (where there have been few developments in the last few decades), and ovarian cancer (a very challenging cancer, especially when detected late).
During my PhD, I studied cancer immunotherapy, which by definition uses the patient’s own immune system as therapy. Usually, the immune system is our natural defence mechanism against invaders — so bacteria, viruses, parasites, or anything abnormal — but cancer is really good at becoming evasive so the immune system can’t see it. That’s how it gets away. Cancer immunotherapy tries to reinvigorate the immune system to shed light on things that it can’t see, such as cancer cells, to help it kill these.
For this research, my main focus was something we call oncolytic viruses. These are viruses that have been engineered to infect and kill cancer cells while leaving healthy cells unharmed. Nature has evolved viruses perfectly into excellent parasites, so we didn’t have to reinvent the wheel here; we just adjusted what the viruses can “see” and “infect,” and turned them against cancer, and now they are a cancer therapy. This type of cancer therapy is slowly advancing in the clinic with two viruses being FDA approved in the past 10 years or so, one of them being approved just recently this year in 2026.
In addition to having the virus infect cancer cells, we learned that we could equip the virus with “instructions” to make it produce an anti-cancer drug directly within the cancer cells. So, imagine how effective and targeted this approach becomes, and with significantly fewer side effects from that drug; now it is being produced within cancer cells, as opposed to giving it intravenously and subjecting patients to broad side effects.
It’s definitely a lot more complicated than this, but this is the general concept! It becomes a therapy within a therapy that becomes extremely targeted to cancer cells. We also learned that we can combine two different viruses together to produce multiple anti-cancer agents within the tumour, which leads to a huge therapeutic benefit, all while being exceptionally tolerable and safe.
While my research is mainly done in laboratory models at this time, I really believe this area of research will change peoples’ lives. It could add an option for patients who don’t have other options. We have shown that next generation immunotherapies like this have an immense amount of therapeutic potential, and we are eager to see the benefit they will truly have when they are deployed to the clinic in the future.
I’m still working on viral therapy platforms and actively trying to push this one into the clinic. Right now, we joke that it’s the vanilla platform, just the bare bones of what we know works, although quite frankly nothing about it is vanilla; I think it’s incredibly exciting as it is! That said there is always room for improvement, so we’re trying to bolster our platform so when it hits the clinic it will be even better.
I’m actively working to expand my research expertise! Every day is a new learning opportunity, which makes this work so incredibly fascinating. More specifically, I’m working on cell-based therapies for cancer, which means we physically extract and mass produce anti-cancer immune cells from the body to use as a living anti-cancer drug. I’m also investigating cancer vaccines and finding out new strategies that can make such vaccines more effective.
I am truly honoured, so pleasantly surprised, and I am flooded with so much appreciation and gratitude! I look around at all of the other incredible award recipients, many of them being my current mentors, and I feel so much pride. And I have so many people to thank! My friends, family, partner, my mentors, everyone who was a part of my journey! There were some really challenging times that I could not have gotten through without my amazing support circle, and everything I have accomplished is because of this amazing team we have!
I have so many mentors. Right now, Dr. Carolina Ilkow, who has given me every opportunity to grow. Dr. Jean-Simon Diallo, my PhD supervisor, is just incredible and trusted in me to run free with my crazy ideas. Dr. John Bell, who always helps us troubleshoot even though he’s wildly busy engineering the future for Canada’s cancer therapy ecosystem. Dr. Rebecca Auer, and I say that on my behalf but also on behalf of all the trainees on the floor; Dr. Auer moves mountains and advocates heavily for patients and trainees. All the patients and community members who have taught me so much.
I love Lord of the Rings. The movies and the books, although admittedly I have not finished the books! It is such a comforting watch as it reminds me of the first time I saw them during my childhood, and it brings back memories of a simpler and very comfortable, warm, and fuzzy time. I also love the core message associated with the original trilogy: even the smallest and most ordinary individuals can alter the course of the world through perseverance, loyalty, humility, friendship, and steadfastness. I think it speaks true to cancer research.
I got hit by a car when I was really young. Chasing a litter of kittens. I didn’t look both ways and jumped out from the bushes. The kitten was fine. I was seven years old, and it broke one of my legs. I was in a cast for months.
A lot of people don’t know we work with viruses. It also sounds a little abstract. A lot of my friends who aren’t in the lab are always shocked that we use viruses.
I love being creative in the kitchen; it’s like doing experiments. I also think it’s one of the easiest but most enriching ways of keeping culture, heritage, and tradition alive. My family lives in Jordan, but we’re originally from Palestine, so I have been continually trying to recreate my grandmother’s original Palestinian recipes. My friends will laugh, but I make really good baklava too!
