Amina Zoubeidi

Zoubeidi joined the Department of Urologic Sciences at the University of British Columbia as an assistant professor in 2010.^[4] In the same year, she was also the recipient of a Prostate Cancer Foundation Durden Foundation Young Investigator Award to fund her research on determining the function of Hsp27 in cancer treatment.^[5] She continued her research into Hsp27 and received funding from the Michael Smith Career Investigator Award for her project Adaptive Stress Response Signaling Driving Treatment Resistance and Metastasis in Cancer.^[6]

While serving in her role as an assistant professor, in collaboration with Vancouver Coastal Health, Zoubeidi continued to search for a cure for prostate cancer and led her research team to numerous discoveries. Zoubeidi and her research team designed a mouse model of Neuroendocrine Prostate Cancer (NEPC) to identify that BRN2 was essential for NEPC to develop.^[7] She firstly used genome editing CRISPR technology to freeze the gene producing the protein driving the emergence of NPEC for the first time.^[8] Following this discovery, she earned a three-year Translation Acceleration Grant from Prostate Cancer Canada and Movember to fund a project to develop blockers of BRN2, a gene linked to the growth of aggressive NPEC.^[9][10] She subsequently became the first female scientist to earn a Translation Acceleration Grant from Prostate Cancer Canada and Movember^[11] and later earned the 2018 UBC Faculty of Medicine Distinguished Achievement Award.^[12]

By 2019, Zoubeidi and her research team developed the first drug that targets and blocks BRN2, thus stopping NEPC tumours and creating a possible treatment for the previously thought incurable disease. They also modified the drug so it could be tested in clinical trials on humans.^[11][13] Similarly, her project The role of the lineage oncogene ASCL1 in treatment-induced neuroendocrine prostate cancer received funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.^[14] She was eventually promoted to the rank of Full professor as a result of her "contributions within the UBC community and her outstanding research career to date."^[15]

• Amina Zoubeidi publications indexed by Google Scholar