Targeting prostate cancer’s growth signals to treat aggressive disease

Grant information

Researchers: Dr Helen Pearson & Professor Richard Clarkson
Institution: Cardiff University
Grant award: £518,203
Reference: RIA22-ST2-009

What you need to know

• Researchers have found a new way to fight aggressive prostate cancer by targeting a group of signals that tell cancer cells to grow and spread. By stopping these signals, they hope to develop a new treatment for prostate cancer.
• They have created a drug that blocks these signals and has shown promise in treating other types of cancer. Now, they want to test if this drug can also help treat prostate cancer.
• The goal is to find out which men with prostate cancer can benefit from this new treatment and learn more about how the signals make cancer cells grow. If successful, this research could lead to a better treatment for prostate cancer and even help treat other difficult cancers.

What will the researchers do?

Dr Pearson, Professor Clarkson and their team aim to find a new and better treatment for aggressive prostate cancer. They’re focusing on a drug they developed that can target and block a set of signals that tell cancer cells to grow and spread. These signals are often too active in aggressive prostate cancer, so stopping them could help treat the disease.

The treatment they developed that can block these signals has already shown promise in treating bowel cancer, so now the researchers want to see if it can also work against prostate cancer. They will do this by testing the drug on prostate cancer cells in the laboratory.

They will also try combining the new drug with hormone therapy, to see if it works even better, and look at different stages and types of prostate cancer to see which men could benefit the most from this new treatment.

How will this benefit men?

Because aggressive prostate cancer is more likely to spread, it is much harder to cure and more dangerous to the men who have it. If this research is successful, it could lead to a new way to treat aggressive disease, and give these men longer, healthier lives.

The researchers believe that this project will give them the information they need to take their potential treatment into a clinical trial, the next step towards getting it into the hands of the people who need it.

More generally, the researchers hope that studying how these cancer growth signals work will lead to a better understanding of how prostate cancer spreads, making it possible to find other potential treatments for aggressive disease, and to develop blood tests that could tell doctors which men would benefit from these treatments.