Dr. Alexander Wyatt

Dr. Wyatt is an Associate Professor in Urologic Sciences at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is a senior research scientist at the Vancouver Prostate Centre and also cross-appointed at BC Cancer. Dr. Wyatt has a DPhil in genetics from the University of Oxford. His research goals are to dissect the clinical relevance of genomic alterations in metastatic genitourinary cancers, and develop minimally-invasive biomarkers for guiding therapy selection.

Dr. Wyatt's lab has established a variety of custom sequencing techniques and novel bioinformatics approaches to interrogate tissue and liquid biopsies from patients enrolled in a series of ongoing clinical trials and biobanks. His lab team works very closely with Dr. Kim Chi and other senior oncologists and urologists, and together have demonstrated that plasma circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) is highly representative of metastatic lesions in prostate and bladder cancer, and that somatic alterations detected in ctDNA can help predict therapy resistance or response.

Dr. Wyatt's research is funded through peer-reviewed grants from the NIH, CIHR, Prostate Cancer Foundation, and CCS. He works closely with the Canadian Cancer Trial Group (CCTG) via the Genitourinary Disease Site Trial Development (as Correlative Science Chair), and the executive committee for the Investigational New Drug Program. Dr. Wyatt directs ctDNA screening and the molecular tumor board for CCTG trial IND.223/234, a multi-center phII umbrella trial in mCRPC (NCT03385655, NCT02905318). His current research leverages a biobank of >4500 clinically-annotated plasma samples from patients with metastatic prostate and urothelial carcinoma to address questions of cancer evolution in the context of different classes of therapeutic agents. This work includes using cell-free DNA fragment patterns to identify real-time changes in transcriptomic features (Herberts et al., Nature 2022).