Philip Kantoff, MD, (left) and Matthew Freedman, MD, are helping lead Dana-Farber's investigations into prostate cancer.
From patterns to predictions
Matters are changing swiftly, however. In laboratories at Dana-Farber and around the world, new technologies and experimental approaches are enabling scientists to dramatically deepen their understanding of the disease, particularly of the genes and proteins that make it tick. Much of the research seeks to predict prostate tumors' future by studying their genetic "personalities," the sets of abnormal genes or patterns of gene activity that drive them. The promise of this work involves new tools for determining whether a prostate tumor is likely to spread, as well as therapies that are more precise and less complicationprone than current treatments.
At Dana-Farber, prostate cancer has become the focus of an avid corps of researchers, working on the disease's molecular riddles from different angles. The motivation for harnessing so much scientific brainpower for one form of cancer is not just the disease's prevalence and unpredictability, but also the fact that Dana-Farber and Harvard can bring a degree of expertise and technological know-how to the problem that is difficult to match.
"The future of prostate cancer prevention and treatment clearly lies in improving our ability to read the molecular 'text' of whether a tumor is likely to be aggressive and which therapies will work best against it," says Philip Kantoff, MD, director of Dana-Farber's Lank Center for Genitourinary Oncology and chief of the Division of Solid Tumor Oncology. "That is the aim of an exceptionally broad range of work at the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center," a group of 900 Harvard-affiliated scientists focusing on cancer.
Investigators' efforts to decipher the molecular workings of prostate cancer — funded in part by a Specialized Programs of Research Excellence (SPORE) grant from the National Cancer Institute — involve scientists from a variety of institutions and disciplines. Their work attempts to answer three broad questions: Is prostate cancer inscribed in a man's DNA — that is, do abnormalities in certain key genes spell a likelihood that the disease will develop or progress? Which proteins in prostate cancer cells make the most inviting targets for therapies? And can genomics, which samples the activity of all the genes within a cell, make it possible to leapfrog some of the complexities of creating drugs for prostate cancer?
Here is a brief look at the work in each of these areas, and at the Dana-Farber scientists leading the effort.
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