Service Unit Leaders

Dr. Kim Chi, MD, FRCPC

Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine, UBC
Medical Director of the Clinical Trials Unit, BCCA, Vancouver

Dr. Chi is a medical oncologist with the BC Cancer Agency and the Vancouver Prostate Centre and chair of the BC Cancer Agency Provincial Genitourinary Cancer Systemic Therapy Group. Dr. Chi’s research is focused in the area of genitourinary cancers with a special interest in prostate cancer and investigational new drugs. This includes phase I, II, and III clinical trials, therapeutic use of antisense oligonucleotides, and mechanisms of treatment resistance. He has led numerous national and international clinical trials of novel therapies for patients with prostate cancer.

Dr. Colin Collins, PhD

Co-Director of the Microarray Facility at the Vancouver Prostate Centre

Dr. Collins is a world renowned Cancer Genetics Scientist who is currently a visiting professor at the Vancouver Prostate Centre from the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Collins’ immediate priority will be to establish prostate cancer specimen sequencing to identify new biomarkers and potential targets for therapy.

Dr. David Huntsman MD, FRCPC, FCCMG

Associate Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at UBC
Director of the Centre for Translational and Applied Genomics (CTAG), and co-Director of the Genetic Pathology Evaluation Centre (GPEC), Director and a co-founder of OvCaRe

Dr. Huntsman has active research programs, which are focused on hereditary gastric cancer and the development of predictive and prognostic tissue-based cancer biomarkers for a wide variety of tumour types. His gastric cancer research has resulted in the discovery of over half of known CDH1mutations. Dr. Huntsman was also a member of the research team that discovered EMSY, a BRCA2interacting protein. The amplification of the EMSY gene is clinically significant in breast and possibly ovarian cancers and over expression of a truncated form of EMSY results in dramatic chromosomal instability.

Dr. Colleen Nelson, PhD

Associate Professor, Dept. of Urologic Sciences, UBC
Senior Research Scientist & Co-Director, Microarray Facility at the Vancouver Prostate Centre

Dr. Nelson is a PhD research scientist whose work is centered on understanding the role of aberrant gene expression in the progression of prostate cancer, with emphasis on the mechanism of androgen-specific gene regulation and the progression to androgen independence. Her lab also studies the effect of dietary and environmental factors on the possible cause, development and progression of prostate cancer.

Dr. Christopher Ong, PhD

Assistant Professor in the Department of Urologic Sciences and Department of Surgery at UBC and Research Scientist at The Vancouver Prostate Centre

The primary focus of Dr. Ong’s research program is to understand the molecular mechanisms that govern the progression of prostate cancer from a state of androgen sensitivity to hormone independence, in particular on the PTEN tumour suppressor gene, which is among the most frequently mutated genes in cancer. Dr. Ong’s laboratory is also involved in the development of unique prostate tumour model systems. He was also involved in the discovery and development of a novel class of small molecule agonists of SHIP. Dr. Ong Is a scientific founder of Aquinox Pharmaceuticals Inc., a biopharmaceutical company focused on development of targeted small molecule therapeutics for treatment of cancer and inflammation.

Dr. Emma Tomlinson-Guns, PhD

Associate Professor, Department of Urologic Sciences UBC
Research Scientist at The Vancouver Prostate Centre

Dr. Tomlinson-Guns heads the Analytical Pharmacology Core (APC) and Natural Products Research Program at the Prostate Centre. Her primary research focus is orientated around the use of natural health products and dietary supplements in prostate cancer and her lab is currently working with several compounds/extracts of interest in prostate tumor models to examine their pharmacokinetics and tissue distribution, toxicity, metabolism and molecular mechanism of the action. They are investigating product quality, as well as the concurrent use of natural products with conventional chemotherapeutics/ treatment strategies to discern both beneficial and adverse interactions.