Creating cancer-seeking treatments to reverse drug resistance

Grant information

Reference: RIA22-ST2-010  
Researchers: Professor Oscar Ces and Professor Charlotte Bevan 
Institution: Imperial College London 
Grant award: £670,499, jointly funded with Cancer Research UK 

What you need to know

• As prostate cancer tumours grow, they become stiffer. This makes it harder to treat them effectively, as treatments like chemotherapy can’t reach far into the tumour.  
• New treatments now exist that can make tumours less stiff, and this project will test a new way of delivering these treatments to the tumour.  
• The researchers will test synthetic cells that contain the anti-stiffness drug. These are designed to only release the drug when they are near to a prostate cancer cell. 

What will the researchers do?

As prostate cancer tumours grow, they become stiffer. This makes it harder to treat them effectively, as treatments like chemotherapy can’t reach far into the tumour. 

This stiffness also creates an environment around the tumour that encourages the cancer to grow and spread further. 

However, new treatments have been developed that can make tumours less stiff, and this project will test a new way of delivering these treatments.  

The project involves creating synthetic cells (known as ‘SynCells’) that contain the anti-stiffness drug, and that are designed to only release it when they get close to a prostate cancer tumour. 

To do this, the researchers will first look at the process of creating the SynCells, testing small changes in how they make them, to see how these changes affect the SynCells’ stability over time and ability to target prostate cancer tumours. 

Next, the researchers will test the most promising kinds of SynCells on both prostate cancer cells and healthy prostate cells, to ensure that they are selective in only releasing the treatment when they are alongside cancer cells.  

The initial tests will use lab-grown cells, and the best-performing SynCells from this stage will be tested on cells taken during biopsies from men with prostate cancer. This will also help the researchers find out how the SynCells’ make-up affects their effectiveness, and the effectiveness of the treatments inside. 

Finally, the researchers will test the SynCells in mice, looking at how the SynCells travel around and how long they last in the body, how well the treatments reduce the stiffness of tumours, and whether this is more effective than delivering the treatments through an injection. They will also combine the SynCell treatment with docetaxel chemotherapy, to see if using SynCells containing an anti-stiffness treatment alongside chemotherapy is more effective at killing cancer cells than docetaxel alone. 

How will this benefit men?

In the short term, this project could gather the evidence needed to move this new kind of treatment towards a clinical trial. 

If that is successful, the research could lead to much more effective treatments for prostate cancer, especially for men whose tumours have become resistant to existing treatments. The treatment could also benefit men whose cancer has spread to other parts of the body, since the SynCells are designed to deliver the treatment to prostate cancer tumours wherever they are found. 

In both cases, the research could help to extend the lives of men who currently have few treatment options available to them.