“High-throughput screening is very labor-intensive. What we are seeing is that with virtual screening, we are able to narrow down what drugs we should be taking through to testing in the laboratory or the clinical trial stage,” says Cherkasov. “When trying to create new drugs in the past, you’d make your best guess on what compound you thought might work, test and get a success rate of about 0.01 percent. The use of virtual screening offers the potential for a much higher success rate—from 10 to 60 percent—which would be an enormous improvement in the field.”

 

In addition, the much faster process, which utilizes software Cherkasov developed and 500 processors at the Centre—with access to thousands more—is expected to generate clinic-ready candidates in as little as two years.

 

“In this type of work, getting funding is difficult,” Rennie states, “and Genome BC jumped in.”

 

The organization funded the project as part of its Strategic Opportunities Fund (SOF), which provides funding to key life sciences initiatives in British Columbia. The project, has received $324,000 in funding, with $161,500 from Genome BC and the rest from other partners including the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Vancouver Prostate Centre.

 

“Chemogenomics is becoming an accepted part of drug discovery and promises to revolutionize the field in a manner comparable to how bioinformatics transformed biology research 10 years ago,” says Dr. Alan Winter, president and CEO of Genome BC. “This project is groundbreaking, and we are excited by the potential impact it could have on prostate cancer research.”