Researcher Discovers Potential Target
for Prostate Cancer
Patients with advanced prostate cancer who do not respond to hormone therapy or in whom it stops working altogether are treated with docetaxel. Unfortunately, that chemotherapy often loses its effectiveness six to eight months into treatment, and in one-third of patients never works at all.
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| A finding by Rakesh Singal, M.D., may lead to a potential therapy for prostate cancer. |
A new discovery by Rakesh Singal, M.D., associate professor of medicine and member of the Prostate, Bladder and Kidney Cancers Site Disease Group at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, may lead to a potential therapeutic target. His study results were published in the February 15 issue of Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.
In many cancers, malignant cells are able to proliferate by shutting down the body’s natural defenses, which include cell death and DNA repair. Repression of genes involved in the “cell death” pathway may result from “DNA methylation,” which is a modification of DNA without changing the original DNA sequence. One encouraging finding is that DNA methylation can be reversed.
For this study, Singal and his associates investigated the methylation-mediated repression of a specific gene, GADD45, knowing that it plays a role in DNA repair and is a key factor in docetaxel chemotherapy-mediated cell death. Singal treated prostate cancer cell lines with drugs that inhibit the methylation process and was able to reverse the methylation of GADD45. Consequently, the cells exhibited renewed sensitivity to docetaxel chemotherapy, indicating that GADD45 is a potential target for the treatment of prostate cancer.
Based on early results of this study, Singal has started a first-of-its-kind clinical trial on prostate cancer patients.
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