Identifying men who will benefit from chemotherapy
Grant information
Reference – TLD-PF19-005
Researcher – Dr George Seed
Institution – Institute of Cancer Research
Duration - 2021-2024
Award - £268,433
We believe that studying this will allow the delivery of better care for aggressive prostate cancers, by helping clinicians select the appropriate treatment for the specific type of prostate cancer that a patient has, and avoid treating patients with aggressive therapies where a drug is unlikely to provide benefit.
Why did we fund this project?
- Chemotherapy is a treatment that can help slow the growth and spread of advanced prostate cancer and help men live for longer. However, chemotherapy does not work equally well for all men, and causes side effects that can be difficult to deal with.
- Currently, doctors determine how well men are responding to chemotherapy by measuring their PSA levels.
- However, this test is not a precise measure of how well the chemotherapy is working, meaning some men remain on chemotherapy despite getting little or no benefit from the treatment.
- Dr George Seed and team want to develop a new, more precise test that can predict how men will respond to chemotherapy.
- This would help ensure men who would benefit are given chemotherapy, whilst men who would benefit little can avoid this treatment’s difficult side effects.
What did the team do?
- In this project, George and team studied small fragments of prostate cancer DNA that can be detected in the blood.
- They looked for changes or patterns in these prostate cancer DNA fragments that were more common in men who benefitted most from chemotherapy in clinical trials.
- This helped them identify changes in prostate cancer DNA that could be detected in a blood test to identify men who are more likely to benefit from chemotherapy.
What did the team achieve?
- The team identified two changes to the prostate cancer DNA that were linked to men living longer in clinical trials of chemotherapy.
- Looking for these changes in prostate cancer DNA in men’s blood could help predict how well men will respond to chemotherapy.
- The team are now studying these changes in prostate cancer cells in the lab, to try and understand exactly how they link to men’s response to chemotherapy.
What does this mean for men?
- The team have identified changes that are linked to how well men respond to chemotherapy.
- These findings could be used to ensure chemotherapy is given to men who are most likely to benefit, whilst men who are less likely to benefit are spared the difficult side effects.
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