Built From Scratch

Most cancer drugs used in Alberta were discovered somewhere else. CCI-001 wasn’t. Dr. Tuszynski, the Allard Chair in Experimental Oncology at the Cross Cancer Institute from 2005 to 2020, set out to build one starting on a computer, and from 2010 his team reworked colchicine, a compound too toxic to use against cancer, so it would bind to a form of tubulin that cancer cells overproduce and healthy cells mostly lack. In 2021 it became the first made-in-Alberta drug that kills cancer cells directly to go into a clinical trial, with medical oncologists Dr. Sawyer and Dr. Spratlin enrolling patients in Edmonton. Spratlin calls it “a wonderful story of bench to bedside.”