Grant: Project Grant

Although many people view prostate cancer as a slow growing, highly curable cancer, the reality is that up to 15% of men will present with spread (metastases) of their prostate cancer at time of diagnosis. This is an incurable situation, with up to half of men dying from their disease within 5 years. There are several newly approved medications that can be effective for metastatic prostate cancer. However, there are no ways to predict how a patient's cancer will respond to these treatments. This prevents personalized treatment decision making that is required in this situation. Prostate cancer cells have been traditionally difficult to grow in the laboratory, and there is a very limited number of prostate cancer cell lines available for researchers to study. Additionally, they represent only end-stage cancers and do not reflect the diversity seen within prostate cancer patient populations. We have had success in growing patient-derived prostate cancer cells using optimized growth conditions. We have been testing these cells using a panel of clinically used treatments to predict which treatments are the most effective. We will expand our approach to grow prostate cancer cells from all new, consenting patients at our Cancer Centre who have metastases. After testing them with clinically used treatments, we will then determine how well our prediction worked for patients receiving the same treatment in the clinic. We will be using cutting edge technologies to compare protein changes in cancers that respond or fail to select treatments. This will allow us to determine how a patient's cancer may resist treatments. Equally important, our proposal will allow us to grow cancer cells that are much more reflective of the diversity seen with prostate cancer patients. Ultimately, we believe that our personalized approach will improve the outcomes of men diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer.