Formation 1998 Location Canada Director of Development & Supportive Care Dr. Larry Goldenberg | Type Cancer Research Executive Director Dr. Martin Gleave | |
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Headquarters Vancouver, British Columbia | ||
The Vancouver Prostate Centre (VPC) is a prostate cancer translational research centre located in Vancouver, British Columbia. It is a UBC and VGH Centre of Excellence and a designated national Centre of Excellence for Commercialization and Research. The VPC is hosted by the Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute and the Department of Urologic Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia. More than 250 people, including 16 Principal Investigators, are employed by the VPC.
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The VPC's research laboratory was initially located in the Jack Bell Research Centre on the Vancouver General Hospital campus. In 2011, the Centre expanded its research laboratories into the Robert H. N. Ho Research Centre, a newly built adjoining building which also houses the Ovarian Cancer Research Program - OVCARE and the Centre for Hip Health and Mobility.
Patient care activities are located in the adjacent Gordon and Leslie Diamond Health Care Centre and include a clinic and clinical trials centre as well as the Prostate Cancer Supportive Care Program
Founding
Drs. Larry Goldenberg, Paul Rennie, Martin Gleave and Nick Bruchovsky founded the VPC (then called The Prostate Centre at VGH) in 1998. In 1999, the Centre was aided with a $20 million donation by Vancouver businessman Jim Pattison (the largest private donation ever made to a health care facility in Canada), a VGH and UBC Hospital Foundation $45 million campaign for matching funds, and a $10 million grant from Health Canada.
Research
The VPC has a large multidisciplinary research program that undertakes basic, clinical, translational and patient research. Current research focuses include: understanding the mechanisms of castrate-resistant prostate cancer, including the development and commercialization of new classes of drugs that may be more effective following hormone therapy failure; and the discovery of new genetic markers and targets for the diagnosis and treatment of advanced prostate cancer.
The VPC's mission is to foster the paradigm of team-driven translational health research to discover molecular mechanisms of cancer progression and therapeutic resistance, and to use this information to develop new services and products that reduce suffering, improve survival for patients with cancer and promote regional growth of biotechnology.
The transdisciplinary team includes experts in oncology, genomics, proteomics, bioinformatics, pathology, pre-clinical pharmacology and clinical trials.
Research at the VPC is funded via peer-reviewed research grant awards and philanthropic support from the VGH and UBC Hospital Foundation.