Peter Black MD

Peter Black is a surgeon-scientist with clinical subspecialty interest in the treatment of urologic cancers, including especially bladder and prostate cancer. He maintains a grant-funded translational research program in urothelial carcinoma with a focus on genomic analysis of response to chemotherapy, mechanisms of resistance to chemotherapy, and novel targeted therapies for bladder cancer. One of his main laboratory projects relates to Notch signaling in bladder cancer. His group was the first to identify Notch2 as an oncogene in bladder cancer, and they are now working to elucidate differential regulation of these oncogenic properties of Notch2 compared to the tumor suppressive properties of Notch1, to modulate both pathways independently for therapeutic purposes. Dr. Black is an active clinical trialist in his field and an active member of the genitourinary cancer committee of SWOG. He is the study chair of the SWOG S1605 trial testing an immune checkpoint inhibitor in BCG-unresponsive high-risk non-muscle invasive bladder cancer and is also PI of an investigator-initiated trial testing local administration of immunotherapy in the bladder. Dr. Black is the surgical co-chair of the NCI (US) Bladder Cancer Task Force.

Dr. Black has many active collaborations, especially related to prostate imaging and image-guided robotic surgery. He works closely with Purang Abolmaesumi and Tim Salcudean in the UBC Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Piotr Kozlowski in Medical Physics, and Hongshen Ma in Mechanical Engineering. A long-standing collaboration with Decipher Biosciences has led to the commercialization of a clinical-grade genomic biomarker for muscle-invasive bladder cancer.

Dr. Black has served as a grant reviewer for multiple international funding agencies including Cancer Research UK, the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program (CDMRP), and most of the main Canadian funding organizations. He is an ad hoc journal reviewer for >30 journals and has received awards for peer review from European Urology (2013 and 2018), the Journal of Urology (2010, 2011, 2015), and the Canadian Urological Association Journal (2016). He has served as assistant editor for Urologic Oncology and Associate Editor for both the World Journal of Urology and European Urology Focus. In 2019 he became the founding editor-in-chief of the Society Internationale d’Urologie Journal.

Dr. Black has received several awards including Best Clinical Paper Published in Literature by the European Association of Urology (2016), the David A. Swanson Distinguished Alumnus Award from MD Anderson Cancer Center (2017), and the Distinguished Achievement Award for Excellence in Clinical or Applied Research by University of British Colombia Faculty of Medicine (2013). He has served on the Board of Directors of the Société Internationale d'Urologie (2013-2019) and is General Secretary of the International Bladder Cancer Network.