Developing new hormone therapies for advanced prostate cancer

What you need to know

• A hormone called adrenomedullin is higher in people with prostate cancer, and makes cancer cells grow and live longer. 
• Researchers want to investigate a way to stop adrenomedullin from doing this without affecting other parts of the body. 
• The result could be a new medicine that has fewer side effects than existing hormone therapies, as well as a new way to track how men are responding to treatment by measuring their adrenomedullin levels. 

What will Professor Skerry, Dr Richards and their teams do?

The researchers in this project are studying a hormone called adrenomedullin, which is found in higher levels in the blood of men with prostate cancer.  

The hormone has several important roles in the body, such as controlling blood pressure. But it also helps cancer cells grow and live longer, and makes it harder for the immune system to fight the cancer.  

There is also evidence that once a man’s prostate cancer has become resistant to hormone therapy, it also becomes more reliant on adrenomedullin, meaning that a new treatment targeting adrenomedullin would be especially helpful to these men. 

In previous research that we funded, Professor Skerry and his team found a way to prevent adrenomedullin from helping cancer cells grow without affecting the hormone's other important functions in the body.  

In this latest project, they will test this potential treatment on tumour samples from men with different stages of prostate cancer, as well as in cells and mice. They hope to see if blocking adrenomedullin with their new drug can stop the growth and spread of prostate cancer, and whether it is more effective before or after the cells become resistant to standard hormone therapy. 

They also want to see if measuring adrenomedullin levels in the blood can help predict how serious a man’s disease will be. 

How will this benefit men?

Advanced prostate cancer is often treated with hormone therapy – treatments that block the effects of hormones like testosterone on cancer cells. However, these drugs have side effects that affect the bones and muscles, as well as a man’s sex life.  

The researchers believe that using their adrenomedullin-blocking drug could provide a new way to control prostate cancer without these side effects, and could improve the quality and duration of life for men with the disease.  

If their research is successful, it could lead to new treatments that are more effective and have fewer side effects than existing ones. This could benefit many men with prostate cancer, especially those with the most advanced forms of the disease. Because the researchers already have a drug that can block the effects of adrenomedullin on cancer cells, this research has the potential to move quickly into clinical trials. 

Grant information

Reference: RIA21-ST2-003 
Researcher: Professor Tim Skerry and Dr Gareth Richards 
Institution: University of Sheffield 
Award: £446,629