Making it count: Tipping the balance towards prostate cancer cell death

Grant information

Researcher: Dr Joe Taylor
Institution: The Institute of Cancer Research, London
Grant award: £294,484
Reference: TLD-CAF22-001

What you need to know

• Dr Taylor is studying a protein called PDCD4 that is found in prostate cancer cells.
• The protein can make cancer cells grow or become weaker, depending on where it is in the cell.
• Dr Taylor aims to develop a new way to treat prostate cancer by using one medicine to make PDCD4 move to a different part of the cell, making the cancer weaker, and then using another medicine to kill the cancer cells.

About Dr Taylor

Dr Taylor completed his PhD at the University of Southampton, where he first began his work understanding the role of PDCD4 in cancer. His interest in translating his discoveries to the clinic to improve care for men with prostate cancer then saw him move to the Institute of Cancer Research and Royal Marsden Hospital as a post-doctoral training fellow.

As part of this project, Dr Taylor will travel to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, USA. There, he will work with Dr Andrew Hsieh, who studies how cells build proteins, and  and how cancer cells can co-opt this process to better grow and spread. The collaboration will teach Dr Taylor new ways to study PDCD4 and its role in prostate cancer.

The project aims to enable Dr Taylor to develop his research independence, so that he can lead his own research team focused on finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in prostate cancer cells to develop new treatments.

What will Dr Taylor do?

Dr Taylor wants to learn more about a protein called PDCD4. This protein is found in different places in prostate cancer cells. His previous research has showed that, depending on where in the cell PDCD4 is, it can either make the cells grow, or slow their growth and make them weaker.

In this project, Dr Taylor wants to see if he can use this to his advantage to develop a new way to treat prostate cancer.

He plans to study the process that causes PDCD4 to move from one part of the cell to the other, and use this knowledge to find a drug that can make that happen. Then, he aims to look at what makes the cancer cells weaker when PDCD4 is in that part of the cell, in order to find a drug that can exploit this weakness to kill the cancer cell. Finally, he will test these findings in prostate cancer samples taken from men with the disease.

By the end of the project, he hopes to be able to show that it is possible to use one medicine to make PDCD4 move to a different part of the cell, weakening it, followed by another medicine to kill the cell. This could one day form part of a new kind of treatment for prostate cancer.

How will this benefit men?

If prostate cancer is found when it is still only in the prostate, it can often be cured with radiotherapy or surgery. But if the cancer spreads to other parts of the body (advanced prostate cancer), it becomes harder to treat.

Dr Taylor believes that by understanding more about PDCD4, he can develop new, more effective treatments targeting PDCD4 that will help men with prostate cancer that has spread.