Grant: Proof of Principle Program - Phase II

Recurrent or metastatic prostate cancer is currently treated with hormone deprivation therapy: patients are pharmacologically (typical) or surgically (now rare) deprived of the male hormones which fuel prostate cancer growth. This therapy works very well for up to several years, but eventually almost all patients develop hormone-therapy resistant prostate cancer (CRPC), and typically succumb to the disease within 2 yrs. New emerging therapies may prolong this period by 3 or 4 months, but do not ultimately stop the disease progression. Our laboratory has developed a new target for this disease treatment pathway which has the potential to sidestep all of the known biological adaptations which lead to the emergence of hormone-therapy resistant prostate cancer. We have also discovered a family of drugs which selectively bind to the novel target and which have shown a significant in-vivo effect in animal models of CRPC. The work proposed herein involves doing late preclinical testing on several of these drug candidates in order to select a specific member of the class to take into clinical development; this work is also a prerequisite for obtaining regulatory approval to commence clinical development.