Mads Daugaard

Dr. Mads Daugaard is a molecular biologist specialized in pre-clinical and translational cancer research. He earned his PhD in 2007 from the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Copenhagen for his studies on heat shock proteins in relation to cancer cell survival mechanisms. After completing his PhD, Dr. Daugaard received a junior fellowship award to continue his work at the Danish Cancer Society Research Centre on stress signaling pathways related to DNA damage response mechanisms. In 2010, Dr. Daugaard received a research award from the Danish Cancer Society to do postdoctoral training in molecular pathology at the BC Cancer Research Centre and the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of British Columbia (UBC).

In 2014, Dr. Daugaard was recruited to the Vancouver Prostate Centre as a senior research scientist and a faculty member of the Department of Urological Sciences at UBC. His ongoing research focuses on molecular and biochemical events underlying sugar-modifications of proteins in solid tumors, chromatin context-dependent DNA repair mechanisms, chemotherapy resistance mechanisms and immune-evasion mechanisms in cancer.

Dr. Daugaard has published original research in top-tier scientific journals and received competitive national and international research funding support from institutions such as the US Department of Defense, the National Cancer Institutes, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Stand Up 2 Cancer initiative, the St. Baldrick’s Foundation and the Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute. Dr. Daugaard was honoured with the Prostate Cancer Canada Rising Star Award in 2014 and the Robert J. Arceci Innovation Award in 2019. 

Dr. Daugaard is a biotech entrepreneur and a co-founder of the biotech companies VAR2 Pharmaceuticals (2012), VarCT Diagnostics (2017), Rakovina Therapeutics (2020) and SnapCyte Solutions (2022).