Dr. Sadar’s research accomplishments and experience over 22 years is essentially entirely focused on the development of therapeutics for prostate cancer. In 1999, Dr. Sadar discovered a novel drug target for prostate cancer. She then partnered with a chemist, Dr. Andersen, to screen drugs against this target, and discovered a clinical candidate of this drug. Dr. Sadar Founded a biotech company in 2009, called ESSA Pharma Inc, to develop the drug for testing in clinical trials. This was successful and First-in-human clinical trials completed at 4 sites in USA and 1 site in Canada Clinical/Trials.gov Identifier: NCT02606123. Only one in a thousand drugs that show promise in laboratory studies and animal models ever reaches human testing. Dr. Sadar’s drug is the first drug in clinical trials that directly binds to an intrinsically disordered protein region and a first in class drug to the N-terminus of the androgen receptor. The work is precedent in the entire field of steroid hormone receptors, with no other small molecule inhibitor reported to bind to the N-terminus of any other steroid hormone receptor (Andersen et al Cancer Cell 2010; Myung et al JCI 2013). Validation of the novelty of her drug was provided by the USAN council and her drug was given a new stem class “-aniten” and the generic name “ralaniten”. In 2016, Dr. Sadar developed the first imaging agent to detect androgen receptor and its active splice variants in prostate cancer (Imamura et al JCI Insight 2016).
The Sadar lab is grateful to the Country Meadows Senior Men's Golf Club for their continued support of this project.