Grant: Project Grant

Prostate cancer (PCa) affects an estimated one out of every seven Canadian men in their lifetime. The standard of care to treat recurrent or metastatic disease is designed to inhibit androgen receptor activation. While treatment is initially successful, almost all patients eventually develop resistance and progress to an aggressive "castrate-resistant" state. Even with the introduction of more potent therapeutics the median survival for these patients is less than 3 years. There is therefore a critical need for drugs that target novel molecular drivers of prostate cancer. HOXB13 is a prostate-specific protein that is essential to the growth of almost all prostate cancers experimental models. Importantly, it does not affect any other tissue. Given this critical role, HOXB13 represents a promising target to treat prostate cancer. The proposed project will first characterize the role of HOXB13 in PCa. Using these results we will identify small molecule inhibitors that directly inhibit HOXB13. From this study, a new class of inhibitors will be created which could lead to the development of novel therapeutic strategies to treat lethal prostate cancer