Rate My Professor Artem Cherkasov

Artem Cherkasov is a Professor in the Department of Urologic Sciences in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia and a Senior Scientist at the Vancouver Prostate Centre, where he also heads Precision Cancer Drug Design. He holds the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Precision Cancer Drug Design, appointed in 2022. Cherkasov joined the UBC faculty in February 2003. His academic background includes a Ph.D. from Kazan University in Russia in 1996 and a Sc.D. from the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2001, along with postdoctoral fellowships at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, and the University of Saskatchewan, and a research associate position at the BC Cancer Research Centre in 2001. He also serves as an Adjunct Professor in Computer Science at Simon Fraser University.

Cherkasov’s research specializes in computer-aided drug discovery, cheminformatics, structure-activity modeling, drug reprofiling, and the development of novel computational tools for identifying new cancer therapeutics, with a primary focus on prostate cancer and the androgen receptor. He has co-authored more than 200 research papers, filed over 80 patents, and contributed to several book chapters. As principal or co-applicant, he has secured grants totaling more than 70 million dollars. Notable achievements include licensing six drug candidates to major pharmaceutical companies such as AstraZeneca and Roche, as well as to venture funds and spin-offs; one androgen receptor inhibitor licensed to Roche in 2015 for 142 million USD set a record for Canadian academic institutions. In 2017, he led a successful 24 million dollar Canadian Foundation for Innovation grant to establish the ADDUCT infrastructure at UBC, advancing cross-disciplinary drug discovery capabilities including cryo-EM and AI-supported personalized medicine. His team has also applied AI platforms such as Deep Docking to screen billions of compounds for potential COVID-19 treatments. Cherkasov maintains an active research program supported by agencies including NSERC, CIHR, and the US Department of Defense.