Innovation Fund award will support research to treat prostate, bladder and kidney cancer.
A new program at Vancouver Prostate Centre (VPC), a Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute and UBC centre of excellence, is receiving a Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) award of over $9 million. The CFI-Innovation Fund awards support leading Canadian scientists to build new tools and infrastructure needed to speed innovation.
The Accelerated Drug Discovery Using Clinical Translation (ADDUCT) program will discover new therapies to treat prostate, bladder, and kidney cancer—3 of the most common cancers in the country, affecting 37,400 Canadians annually. Virtually all patients with metastatic cancer development treatment resistance and subsequently die of their disease. ADDUCT is designed as a complete and integrated ‘bench-to-bedside’ discovery program, increasing the capacity for protein structural analysis and computer-aided drug design to find targeted therapeutics for prostate, bladder, kidney, and other cancers that are currently treatment-resistant.
“ADDUCT clearly addresses a high health care priority as prostate, bladder, and kidney cancer comprise three of the top eight malignancies in Canada,” says Dr. Art Cherkasov, the leading researcher of ADDUCT. “We hope that our advances in treating these cancers will also lead to potential treatments to other cancers, as we have done previously.”
The proposed drug design and development platform will link and integrate the existing drug discovery capabilities available at the BC Cancer Agency, the University of British Columbia’s Advanced Structural Biology of Re-emerging Infectious Diseases (ASTRID) initiative, the Centre of Drug Research and Development and the Vancouver Prostate Centre. Ultimately, the goal of ADDUCT will generate new drugs and treatment options for therapy of prostate, bladder and renal cancer patients.
