How does treating the prostate affect cancer that has already spread beyond it?
Grant information
Reference: MA-TIA22-005
Researchers: Professor Charlotte Bevan, Professor Hashim Ahmed, Dr Damien Leach
Institution: Imperial College London
Award: £1,583,075
What you need to know
- Once prostate cancer spreads beyond the prostate it is harder to treat, and has a much lower survival rate.
- These researchers want to understand how treating the cancer in the prostate affects the cancer in other areas of the body.
- By studying samples of blood and cancer cells from men before and after treatment, they hope to discover how the cancer communicates and how treatment can be personalized for better outcomes.
- This knowledge may lead to new treatments and improved survival for men with advanced prostate cancer.
What will the researchers do?
Professor Charlotte Bevan and her team want to understand how treating the prostate can affect the cancer that has spread to other parts of the body. They believe that the cancer in the prostate can communicate with the cancer that has spread, and they want to find out how this communication happens.
To do this, the researchers will work with a group of men who have moderately advanced prostate cancer. They will ask these men to provide blood samples and small pieces of tissue from the cancer in their prostate and the cancer in other parts of their body. They will collect these samples before and after the men receive different treatments, such as surgery or radiotherapy.
The researchers will then perform detailed tests on these samples. They will look at the genetic material in the blood and study the DNA and proteins in the cancer cells. They will also grow tissue in the lab to mimic prostate cancer, in order to further study it.
By analysing all this data, the researchers hope to understand how the cancer cells in the prostate and the cancer cells in other parts of the body communicate with each other. They also want to see how the treatments affect this communication. This information could help them find new and better ways to treat prostate cancer that has spread outside the prostate.
We will explore whether (and how) treating the tumour within the prostate can affect secondary tumours elsewhere in the body. This will also improve our understanding of how prostate tumours spread – which will be vital to treating this when it has happened and, perhaps more importantly, preventing it in the first place. The results will contribute to personalised medicine and, in the longer term, to new therapies. This is a big project requiring a team of experts based in the UK, Europe, and the US, and we are thrilled that the scale of Prostate Cancer UK's vision is going to make it happen.
How will this benefit men?
In the short term, the researchers aim to understand how cancer communicates, and to share their findings with other scientists and patient groups. They hope that knowing how and why treatments to the prostate affect tumours around the body will lead to more effective treatments, as well as further studies to uncover which treatment is most effective and why.
In the long term, they want to improve outcomes for men with advanced prostate cancer by finding new ways to treat the disease and developing new therapies.
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