Wrestling with a killer

As a UBC undergrad, Martin Gleave won four national wrestling championships, five Western Canada wrestling championships and was named the university’s “Male Athlete of the Year” in 1983. He earned a degree in physical education. He then entered the Faculty of Medicine, intending to specialize in sports medicine and injuries. Instead, he became increasingly drawn to urology, the branch of medicine that deals with surgical care of diseases involving the urinary and male genital systems. His UBC medical degree in hand, he headed to the world famous M.D. Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas, where he studied the biology of prostate, bladder, kidney and testicular cancers. He returned to UBC in 1992 as a faculty member and clinician.

Today, Dr Gleave holds the Liber Ero BC Leadership Chair in Prostate Cancer Research and is Director of the Prostate Centre at Vancouver General Hospital (VGH).  The Chair is supported by a $2.25 million award from the province’s Leading Edge Endowment Fund, matched by the VGH & UBC Hospital Foundation, with funds provided by Liber Ero Foundation, Mr. Lube Canada in memory of the late Ted Ticknor and other generous donors.

“Prostate cancer is more heterogeneous than any other form of cancer,” explains Dr. Gleave. “This creates issues regarding how the disease will progress in each patient. In planning treatment, we must identify the characteristics of the cancer in each individual patient, so we can predict whether or not their particular cancer is a risk factor for longevity. Some prostate cancers we don’t have to treat; we just have to watch to see what happens.”

Prostate cancer is second only to lung cancer as a leading cause of death in males. And its incidence is growing as the population ages, because onset normally begins in the fifties. Moreover, it is the most hormone-sensitive of all the cancers. Dr. Gleave points out that initially it is more androgen-sensitive than breast cancer is estrogen-sensitive (the main androgen is testosterone), but later on it becomes independent of hormones. So a lot of prostate cancer research today seeks to understand how this cancer can progress to a point where it grows independent of hormonal influence.

His research program includes identifying the mechanisms that make prostate cancer resistant to treatment. “When we try to kill a cancer cell with hormone therapy or chemotherapy, certain stress-related genes, pathways and networks are activated. They allow the cancer cells to survive a normally lethal treatment. We want to identify these genes, pathways and networks. Then we can seek agents that inhibit the stress response. Fortunately, our laboratory here at VGH has one of the world’s largest banks of post-treated prostate cancers, and we can draw upon that to develop anti-cancer agents.”

Several such agents (drugs) have been licensed to OncoGenex Technologies, a UBC/VGH Prostate Centre spin-off company founded by Dr. Gleave, who is Chief Scientific Officer. Through UBC, OncoGenex has exclusive rights to seven US and foreign patents, and 91 patent applications are pending.

Centres of research excellence - - like The Prostate Centre at VGH - - provide ideal environments for training scientists and clinicians. Indeed, in the past five years, the Centre has trained over 60 graduate students, 35 post-doctoral fellows, 20 clinical fellows and 30 undergraduates, many of whom have gone on to careers in basic biomedical and clinical science in British Columbia.

The BC Leadership Chair helped keep Dr. Gleave in BC, as he received some very tempting offers from elsewhere. It has also enabled UBC and VGH to recruit two new faculty scientists to work in the prostate cancer research group.

Dr. Gleave concedes that he doesn’t wrestle anymore. But he enjoys a brisk game of tennis and the opportunity to relax at his island retreat in Howe Sound, northwest of Vancouver. “I can just about see it from my Prostate Cancer Centre office.”

For more information about Dr. Gleave and his research, visit www.prostatecentre.com/aboutus/aboutus.php?pageID=119