An international team of investigators from centers in the United States and the United Kingdom, including Weill Cornell Medical College, have been awarded a grant for $10 million over a three-year period to study the molecular underpinnings of metastatic prostate cancer while creating a comprehensive testing system to optimize personalized treatments.
Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C) and the Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCF), along with the American Association for Cancer Researc, SU2C’s scientific partner, announced the formation of a new “Dream Team” dedicated to prostate cancer research.
Weill Cornell Medical College investigators include Dr. Mark Rubin, the project’s principal investigator at Weill Cornell, and Dr. Himisha Beltran.
One of the project’s goals is to try to understand why therapies can become ineffective, despite working initially, and if patients may be treated with other types of therapies or participate in clinical trials. The researchers plan to develop cell line models to study tumor mutations to determine, for example, if they are the culprit behind such cancer recurrences in patients. In addition, the investigators plan to study novel combinations of drugs in clinical trials, including exploring the use of PARP inhibitors and drugs that inhibit the PTEN pathway, which is involved in cell signaling and growth. PTEN is a well known tumor suppressor gene. PARP inhibitors prevent an enzyme involved in DNA repair, especially in the repair of tumor cells, from working.
Click here to read more about the grant.
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