Dr Yuzhuo Wang

Dr. Yuzhuo Wang (王玉琢院士) has a dual appointment as a Senior Research Scientist at the Vancouver Prostate Centre and Distinguished Scientist at the BC Cancer. He is also the Founder of the Living Tumor Laboratory (www.livingtumorlab.com) and a Professor in Department of Urologic Sciences at UBC. Dr. Wang did his Ph.D. at the University of Hong Kong, and joined Dr. Gerald R. Cunha at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) as a postdoctoral fellow in 1997. Since then, He has authored/co-authored over 210 peer reviewed articles, many in top-tier journals such as Cancer Research, Cancer Cell, Nature Medicine, Nature, Clinical Cancer Research, and European Urology. He has published 14 book chapters and edited two books (i.e. PDX Model of Human Cancers and Tumor Dormancy) with an H-index of 78. As a principal investigator, he is well funded by a number of agencies (e.g., the Canadian Institutes of Health Research).

Dr. Wang’s academic contributions can be highlighted by a number of novel hypotheses he has proposed, such as hypotheses on “prostate stem cells”, “epithelial-immune cell transition (EIT)”, “cancer-generated lactic acid is critical, immunosuppressive metabolite rather than a ‘waste product’ (which has been believed for more than 90 years)” and “tumour dormancy is a non-genetic disease”. Dr. Wang is recognized for his pioneering work in the field of prostate cancer modeling. He was the first to establish tissue recombination model of hormonal prostatic carcinogenesis. He also developed the first model of hormonal carcinogenesis in human prostatic epithelium. Moreover, he is responsible for a novel method for establishing transplantable, patient-derived xenograft models that closely resemble patients’ malignancies. Using the methodology, his group has developed over 300 transplantable patient-derived xenograft models in the Living Tumor Laboratory. Importantly such “next generation” xenograft models have been effectively applied in a number of research areas, such as (i) preclinical drug efficacy studies in anti-cancer therapeutics development, (ii) discovery and validation of potential biomarkers and/or therapeutic targets, and (iii) personalized cancer therapy.

Dr. Wang has received numerous awards for his academic achievements in cancer research, such as a Prostate Cancer Foundation Research Award (2007), the Translation Research Award from Roche (2009), an Overseas Chinese Scholars Award from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (2009), the Innovative Scholar Award from the International Cancer Alliance for Research and Education (ICARE), US (2010), an UBC Faculty of Medicine Distinguished Achievement Award (2011), and five Department of Urologic Sciences Research Teaching Excellence Award (2013, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021), and two PCF Challenge Awards (US) (2020, 2021). Notably, he has been inducted as a Fellow of  the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (FCAHS) (加拿大健康科学院院士) in 2018.