Dr. Alex Wyatt has taken on the role of scientific director for the Clinical Cancer Genomics Program at BC Cancer.
Dr. Wyatt will maintain his research on prostate and bladder cancer genomics at the Vancouver Prostate Centre and serve as an associate professor in Urologic Sciences at the University of British Columbia. Additionally, he holds a senior scientist position at the Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre at BC Cancer. His research aims to uncover links between (epi-)genomic changes and patient outcomes in advanced prostate and bladder cancer, with the goal of translating these insights into clinical biomarkers. His team has pioneered laboratory and computational methods to analyze genomic and epigenomic characteristics in circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA). By applying these techniques to clinical trial cohorts, they have shown that ctDNA accurately reflects metastatic lesions, can predict resistance to targeted treatments, and reveals the rapid evolution of prostate and bladder cancer through various systemic therapies.
Dr. Wyatt chairs the correlative sciences and tumor biobanking for the Canadian Cancer Trial Group (CCTG), where he contributes to the design and implementation of phase I-III clinical trial protocols nationwide. He also oversees the ctDNA screening strategy and the molecular tumor board for the first multi-center phase 2 umbrella trial in metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (NCT03385655, NCT02905318).