Grant: Operating Grant: Industry-partnered Collaborative Research

Evaluation of potential anticancer drugs is - at present - commonly carried out with preclinical cancer models that consist of special, immuno-deficient mice carrying grafts of cultured human cancer cells available commercially. While such commercial cancer cell line models have merits for basic cancer research, the cell lines used have evolved biologically during generations of cultures and do not properly represent patients' cancers and consequently do not adequately predict efficacy of anticancer drugs in the clinic. Even when new anticancer drug candidates have successfully passed all stages of efficacy testing performed with commercial cancer cell line models, only about 5% gets approval for clinical usage by the US Food and Drug Administration. The high number of ineffective new drug candidates entering clinical trials indicates an urgent need for better ways of predicting clinical drug efficacy before drugs are tested in humans. Drs. Wang and Collins at the BC Cancer Agency and the Vancouver Prostate Centre propose, in collaboration with BRI Biopharmaceutical Research Inc. (www.bripharm.com), to establish next-generation patient-derived prostate cancer models, which more closely resemble a patient's cancer than the existing standard cancer models. Such next generation models will provide valuable tools for studying the molecular and cellular development and progression of prostate cancer, and for the development of new therapies and their application in personalized prostate cancer therapy.