PG12-02 Worthington Lay summary
Principal Investigator: Dr Jenny Worthington, Lecturer in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Ulster
Lay title:
A new drug combination for treatment of advanced prostate cancer.
What are you proposing?
To use a new drug combination therapy to improve the treatment of advanced prostate cancer and in particular to reduce the spread of prostate cancer to other parts of the body.
Why are you proposing it?
All tumours have areas which contain very low levels of oxygen (hypoxia). Recent studies, both in the laboratory and in the clinic, have shown that hypoxic cells are important in making prostate cancer more malignant/aggressive, in particular in forming tumours in other parts of the body (metastasis). This is very important because these metastatic deposits (often found in bone) cause considerable pain to patients and are often the cause of treatment failure.
Bioreductive agents are a type of chemotherapy drug that only work in hypoxic conditions and kill the aggressive hypoxic cells. We have shown in our mouse models that including a bioreductive drug with normal prostate cancer treatment stops the tumour from growing so quickly, but more importantly, stops metastatic deposits from forming. The purpose of this study is to work out the best way to give these bioreductive drugs to patients.
How are you proposing to do it?
Bioreductive drugs only kill hypoxic cells therefore we need to combine them with other standard prostate cancer treatments; this should target the cells that contain higher levels of oxygen as well as the hypoxic cells giving the best chance of treating the cancer. We will use our animal models of prostate cancer, and will work out the best time to give the bioreductive drug in combination with standard treatments. We will also measure how oxygen levels relate to number of blood vessels in the tumour, since it is likely that the fewer the blood vessels the lower the oxygen. We will also investigate what genetic changes occur during tumour treatments so we can find out exactly what the drugs are doing to the tumour cells.
How long will it take?
36 months
What is the budget?
£213,603
What are the expected outcomes?
We aim to prove that killing hypoxic prostate cancer cells with a bioreductive drug (in combination with standard prostate cancer therapies) can control the growth of prostate tumours and, most importantly, can reduce the number of tumours which form in other parts of the body.
How could it make a difference to the lives of men affected by prostate cancer?
With the correct treatment schedule the combination of a bioreductive drug with commonly used treatments for prostate cancer could increase the time that men have before their tumours stop responding to treatment. In addition it should reduce the number of painful bone metastases that men with prostate cancer experience. The bioreductive drug which we propose to use in this study has limited side effects so patients should not experience increased toxicity from the combination treatment.
Please write a summary of the project in one sentence only.
The project aims to kill hypoxic tumour cells to improve the treatment of advanced prostate cancer.