Dr Artem Cherkasov

Dr. Artem Cherkasov is a Professor in the Department of Urologic Sciences, Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia, and Senior Scientist at the Vancouver Prostate Centre. His research interests include computer-aided drug discovery (CADD), structure-activity modeling, drug reprofiling, new cancer therapeutics discovery and development of novel CADD tools and applications.

Dr. Cherkasov has co-authored more than 200 research papers, 80 patent filings and several prominent book chapters. During his tenure at UBC, Dr. Cherkasov has been a principal applicant or co-applicant on a number of successful grants totalling over 70M dollars, and has licenced 6 drug candidates to big pharma companies (AZ, Roche), major international venture funds (5AM) and spin-off companies.

Notably, the androgen receptor inhibitor developed by Drs. Cherkasov and Rennie was licensed by Roche in 2015 for 142M USD – a record amount for Canadian academic institutions.

In 2017, Dr. Cherkasov led a group of 10 prominent PIs in a successful 24M dollar application to the Canadian Foundation of Innovation to create a complete ADDUCT (Accelerated Drug Discovery Using Clinical Translation) infrastructure at UBC. The grants completes the UBC cross-discipline drug discovery platform with the latest cryo-EM technology, enhanced protein production and purification capabilities and substantial computational infrastructure, providing cutting-edge CADD and AI support for personalized drug discovery.

In response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Cherkasov's team utilized their novel AI-based platform, Deep Docking (DD), with the recently published structure of the COVID-19 Mpro target, applying DD to process 1.3 billion compounds; within a week, they had identified the top 1000 potential ligands which they shared with the scientific community. Continued work narrowed this to a shortlist of the top 100 candidate protease inhibitors that could lead to a treatment. The next step is to purchase samples of the top 100 candidates and work with collaborators to screen them in a timely fashion, in order to accelerate the top candidates through the VPC's established drug development pipeline.

Dr. Cherkasov holds a number of other research grants from NSERC, CIHR, Prostate Cancer Canada, Prostate Cancer Foundation BC, US Department of Defense, Canadian Cancer Research Institute, and NIH among others. In January 2022, he was appointed Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Precision Cancer Drug Design.

Last updated January 12, 2022