Each year, more than 35,000 men die from prostate cancer in the U.S. because metastatic prostate cancer stops responding to the current treatment options. There is an urgent need to develop new therapies that overcome this acquired resistance. That is why Hannelore Heemers, PhD, MS, BS, is researching a new strategy to reduce prostate cancer deaths.
Dr. Heemers is targeting a biological process, known as alternative splicing, by which genes can express multiple forms of a protein, which are also known as splice variants. Splice variants can each alter cell behavior in a different way. In prostate cancer, splice variants occur that stimulate cancer growth and cause resistance to the therapies that are being administered.
However, the exact molecular mechanisms by which the splice variants are generated are not known. Their laboratory has discovered a new molecular regulator of alternative splicing events that are enriched in prostate cancer that has failed the available therapies. They propose that reversing the effects of this new regulator of alternative splicing may be especially worthwhile for the development of new prostate cancer therapies.
In order for the proposed new therapeutic strategy to be successful, researchers need to understand exactly how the splice variants that are controlled by the new alternative splicing mechanism that we discovered drive control prostate cancer progression and test whether reversing these splicing events delays prostate cancer progression and improves the response of existing treatments, such as androgen deprivation therapy. Dr. Heemers hopes the results lead to a new therapy that can overcome acquired treatment resistance in prostate cancer.
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