BestBits.ca Journal Club
BestBits.ca Journal Review is a synopsis of current literature in Pediatric Hematology & Oncology. BestBits Pediatric Hematology Oncology Virtual Journal Club discusses featured articles from each of the Journal Review issues. The aim is to create an open access online interactive learning resource of relevant current literature for Pediatric Hematology/ Oncology health professionals and facilitate practice of journal screening, reading, summarizing and critical appraisal.
Editors
From left to right: Dr. Jack Brzezinski, Dr. Natasha Alexander and Dr. Nicolas Waespe. Contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Dr. Jack Brzezinski is a pediatric oncologist with a clinical and research interest in renal tumours. He is currently pursuing a PhD in molecular genetics with a focus on molecular risk stratification of Wilms tumours. He has published in several high impact journals and presented at international conferences. He co-founded the Best Bits journal club after realizing that despite a voracious appetite for oncology literature, he was unable to find or read all of the studies he needed to be a well rounded clinician and researcher. After realizing that his colleagues were in the same boat he decided that pooling their resources would help them to solve a shared problem. He is looking forward to all the knowledge he will be able to gain with this expanded online rollout.
Dr. Nicolas Waespe is a Research Collaborator with The Hospital for Sick Children since February 2017 and is pursuing a PhD at the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Nicolas focuses on clinical and translational research in inherited and acquired diseases leading to bone marrow insufficiency/ dysfunction, cancer genetics and cancer predisposition syndromes. Nicolas studied medicine in Switzerland and France and worked in Pediatric Hematology/ Oncology at the largest Swiss Pediatric Hospital, the University Children’s Hospital Zurich, for three years. He continued as a Clinical and Research Fellow in Hematology/ Oncology at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto from July 2014 to February 2017. Nicolas is a co-founder and editor of BestBits.
Reviewers
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Lesleigh Abbott |
Ehud Even-Or Ashely Geerlinks Ashley Globa Ana Guerreiro-Stucklin Gail Halliday Fyeza Hasan Arnold Jacob Grace Lam Karin Langenberg Marie-Claude Pelland-Marcotte Samuele Renzi |
Raoul Santiago MacGregor Steele Jason Stoffman Soumitra Tole Nicolas Waespe Danielle Weidman Laura Wheaton Marta Wilejto Antonella Zanette Michal Zapotocky |
Short History of Our Projects
The “Best Bits of the Literature” project started in 2015 when we, three senior fellows from the Hospital for Sick Children, realized the struggles of pediatric Hematologists/ Oncologists with keeping themselves up to date in a busy clinical and research environment alike. The wide array of research efforts worldwide and thus increasing volume of the literature in a multitude of different journals render it difficult to screen them on a regular basis. On top of that, there is a dispersion of articles covering information relevant to pediatric patients in a multitude of journals covering adult and pediatric literature alike. We couldn’t find a good compilation of the relevant articles anywhere to facilitate screening the current literature to keep us up to date. Therefore, we decided to start a magazine with summaries of pertinent literature on a bi-monthly basis with the help of fellows from SickKids.
We included roughly 20 journals covering Hematology/ Oncology and asked the fellows to write short summaries of the articles relevant to pediatric topics including a conclusion putting the novel findings in the context of current knowledge. After successful compilation of five issues we realized that this project gathered a lot of attention and was well received. We therefore applied to the Garron Family Cancer Centre Fund for Innovative Projects and used the money granted to build this website with the intent of dispersing the initiative to a wider audience. We look forward to expanding this educational resource to encourage journal reading, critical appraisal and discussion of the latest literature, as well as networking within the Pediatric Hematology Oncology literature.
We thank all the contributors for their efforts and invite anyone interested in participating to contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
