Why do some men stop responding to radiotherapy, and can we find new treatments for them?
Grant information
Researcher: Dr Susan Heavey
Institution: University College London
Grant award: £544,476
Reference: RIA21-ST2-009
What you need to know
• Dr Susan Heavey is working on a project to help men who have prostate cancer and whose cancer has come back after radiotherapy.
• The project is called Radio3D, and it aims to identify new treatments that can make radiotherapy more effective or help men whose cancer has recurred after radiotherapy.
• The project will collect samples from men with prostate cancer, grow 3D models of the cancer in the lab, and test a range of treatments on these models to find new treatments for these men.
What will Dr Heavey and her team do?
When men are treated with radiotherapy for prostate cancer, the treatment may not work as well as hoped, and the cancer may not go away. In other cases, the cancer may appear to be cured, but years later it comes back.
Dr Heavey wants to find new drugs that could be used to enhance the effectiveness of radiotherapy and to treat men whose cancer has recurred following radiotherapy. This is important because these men currently have limited treatment options.
To do this, Dr Heavey plans to build something called a "platform" for investigating prostate cancer. This means she wants to create a way to study prostate cancer in a laboratory so she and other researchers can test potential new treatments.
Firstly, she will collect small samples of tissue from men with prostate cancer who have had radiotherapy at University College London Hospital. This will help her understand why the cancer comes back and find new ways to treat it.
Next, she will grow three-dimensional models of the cancer cells in the laboratory. These models will be more like real cancer cells in the body, so Dr Heavey can test new drugs to see if they could help.
Finally, she will test different drugs in these models to see which ones work best. Dr Heavey hopes this will help her find new treatments that can help men with prostate cancer, especially those whose cancer has come back after radiotherapy.
How will this benefit men?
Some men who are treated with radiotherapy for prostate cancer find that their cancer comes back, and there are currently limited treatment options for these men.
Dr Heavey's research aims to find new drugs that can be used to enhance the effectiveness of radiotherapy or treat the cancer once it has returned. This could lead to better outcomes for men with prostate cancer and could potentially prevent the need for further treatments.
By making the data available to the wider research community, Dr Heavey’s research could also help to speed up other research into new treatments.
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