A potential treatment for advanced prostate cancer developed by UBC and Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute (VCHRI) scientists has been licensed to pharmaceutical company Roche to help move the technology into a finished product. Developed at the Vancouver Prostate Centre, the new drug technology (now in preclinical development) could one day be used to treat prostate cancers that have become resistant to existing treatments. When advanced prostate cancer spreads it becomes metastatic and virtually incurable. Current treatments initially slow the spread of the disease and help prolong a patient’s life, but the cancer eventually mutates and becomes resistant to drugs. The potential new treatment, developed using a computer technology that can scan a database of millions of different molecules to find the ones that will work best as possible treatments, is designed to target a site in the cancer cells that is not prone to mutation.

Research will continue in collaboration with the scientists at the Vancouver Prostate Centre, a research hub hosted by UBC and VCHRI and designated a national Centre of Excellence for Commercialization and Research. The research was funded in part by Prostate Cancer Canada, Prostate Cancer Foundation (US), Safeway Canada, the CIHR’s Proof of Principle commercialization program, and PC-TRiADD.

For more information about the Vancouver Prostate Centre’s research initiatives, visit www.prostatecentre.com/our-research [9].