I’m a very proud Canadian of Norwegian and Slovenian descent. My early years were those reminiscent of a nomad. Living in the USA, Mexico (where we had a chicken we named Marco Pollo), and then back to Canada to Kimberley where I learned to ski at 4 years old, then Esterhazy where I learned what it meant to be cold (but a dry cold which frankly didn’t mean much), and then to Kamloops where I finally thawed out. Upon arriving in Kamloops, my family lived in a tent for the first couple weeks of my school. This scored me huge admiration from the other children. No doubt that was when my popularity peaked. Summers in the Interior of British Columbia were mostly spent in the Chilcotin/Caribou area where my father was an inspector for the Ministry of Mine and would spend his days assessing prospect claims in the mountains while I fished, panned for gold, practiced arcery, and swam. Winters were spent on the ski hills and this remains my passion today.

Observing nature and being taught how things work from an early age were probably the greatest contributing factors to my pursuit of a career in science. My first job, in grade 7, was cleaning golf clubs for $2 per hour at Kamloops Golf and Country Club. During and after my undergraduate degree I worked as an organic chemist to make pheromones, ink for press publications, and analyzed samples for Environment Canada and then Fisheries and Oceans. I pursued my PhD when I was older, after working for a number of years. I had ambitions of getting my PhD in an area that would make me competitive for a position as a Research Scientist with Fisheries and Oceans at the West Vancouver laboratory to study environmental contaminants present in our waters, aquatic organisms, and sediments. To this end, I packed-up and moved to the U.K. and then Sweden where I successful defended my dissertation entitled “The regulation and Mechanism of Induction of Cytochrome P450 in Rainbow Trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss)” , and consumed spaghetti seven days a week for indefinite periods of time. My cooking skills have not improved since then and I still love spaghetti.

Dr. Nicholas Bruchovsky, a prominent MD/PhD at BC Cancer, recruited me in 1995 as a post-doctoral fellow to work on discovering the molecular mechanisms that drive advanced prostate cancer. His philosophy was that all research done in his department should have the goal of improving the lives of patients. Today I am still at BC Cancer, where for 24 years I have been working on therapies for advanced prostate cancer. In 2009, I co-founded a spin-out company as President and today this is a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq (EPIX, Mkt Cap US$93.8M). The goal of the company is to commercialize and bring to market the drugs that I discovered with my collaborator Dr. Raymond Andersen of the Chemistry Department at UBC for the treatment of advanced prostate cancer. A first generation drug, ralaniten-acetate, provided some indication of efficacy in clinical trials that completed in November 2017. A next-generation drug, EPI-7386, with improved metabolic stability, is expected to be tested in clinical trials early in 2020.