Dr. Zoubeidi is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Cancer Therapy Resistance. Her research program aims to uncover how standard care of prostate cancer therapy targeting the androgen receptor (AR) induces treatment resistance and controls phenotypic plasticity, which has been associated with the clinically relevant problem of drug resistance in prostate cancer. Importantly, amplification of different signaling pathways may be unique to an individual and their disease; therefore, her research program is designed to identify and understand common signaling nodes responsible for the emergence of resistance to ultimately design the best combination therapy to guide clinical decisions.

Her multifaceted research program addresses:

• Why is treatment-induced lineage reprogramming biased toward particular lineage?
• How the change in the chromatin architecture can permit an opportune environment for transcription factors (including the Androgen Receptor) to be “reprogrammed” and, in turn, facilitate tumour cell plasticity and therapy resistance?
• Can we predict resistance mechanisms early in tumour evolution?
• Does this inherent epigenetic plasticity can be therapeutically re-direct cell fate using epigenetic or transcription factor inhibitors?
• How changes in the epigenome can influence the metabolome and how the metabolome influence the epigenome to support lineage plasticity?

Dr. Zoubeidi has been successful in establishing national and international collaborations on research projects and grants from the public and private sector. This has resulted in over 129 peer-reviewed manuscripts in Cancer Discovery, Cell, Nature Cell Biology, Nature communications, and other and holds 8 patent applications. She received substantial funding She received substantial funding from national (CIHR, TFRI, PCC) and international (PCF-USA, DOD, NIH-SPORE) agencies totalling over 20M dollars. She is currently the leader/PI of the recently awarded Terry Fox New Frontiers Program Project on understanding lineage plasticity in treatment resistance.

She has been recognized by the Prostate Cancer Foundation-USA (PCF) and was awarded the prestigious PCF Young Investigator Award and PCF challenge awards. She is a Michael Smith Scholar and Terry Fox New Investigator. Received awards from UBC including Faculty of Medicine Distinguished Achievement Award in Overall Excellence – Early Career, University of British Columbia, Award for excellence in mentoring Early Career Award, multiple Research Teaching Award for Excellence in Basic Science, Department of Urologic Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia and Excellence in Urological Research from the American Urological Association & the Society for Basic Urologic Research. Moreover, her track record of research excellence is underscored by numerous accolades from the American Association for Cancer Research, the American Urological Association, the Northwest Urological Society and others. She had the honor of being invited to speak at numerous national and international conferences including AACR and CCRC and as a visiting professor at different Universities. She serves on several grant panel review committees including NIH, AACR, the Canadian Institute of Health Research and Prostate Cancer Foundation USA. She is a member of the editorial board of Endocrine Related Cancer and ad hoc reviewer for numerous journals.