Funding from a Fife cancer charity could lead to breakthroughs in the treatment of one of Britain’s biggest killers.
Prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in men in the UK, with more than 37,000 cases a year of which 2700 are in Scotland.
However, new research in America funded by cash from a St Andrews organisation could lead to the development of new drugs to treat the condition.
Thanks to a £179,532 grant from the Association for International Cancer Research (AICR), Dr Cynthia Miranti will investigate the mechanism that controls alterations in cells in the prostate gland.
She will concentrate on the possibility that prostate cancer arises because of ‘mistaken change’ occurring within these cells.
This has been found to be the cause of at least one type of leukaemia, which can now be treated with drugs to force the cells to complete the proper change.
If Dr Miranti and her team at the Van Andel Research Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan, find the theory to be correct, they believe it could lead to the design of radical new drugs to fight prostate cancer.
The prostate gland has two layers the lower comprises the smaller basal cells and the upper layer the larger, secretory cells.
Dr Miranti recently discovered that a hormone-like molecule called KGF could make the basal cells develop into secretory cells.ChangeThis would suggest that, in the healthy prostate gland, as the secretory cells wear out and die, they are replaced by cells from the basal layer undergoing this change.
Prostate cancer cells have some characteristics of basal cells and some of secretory cells. Should the process of changing from one cell type to another go wrong, it could create an early form of a prostate cancer cell.
Dr Miranti said, “It is not a simple switch multiple steps are involved when basal cells change into secretory cells.
“We are investigating which specific molecules are responsible for this change in the normal, healthy gland and trying to map the order of the events involved.”
She added, “At the same time, we are determining where within this sequence of events things start to go wrong to cause prostate cancer.
“We are doing this by looking at genes that are known to be involved in prostate cancer and examining how these genes interfere with the ability of the cells to complete the change.”
Dr Miranti believes her findings are potentially groundbreaking.
She said, “One possible outcome of our studies is that we could use our findings to design treatments that ‘push’ the tumour cells to complete the change into secretory cells.
“This would greatly reduce the aggressiveness of the cancer and reduce the risk of cancer spread and, ultimately, death.”
AICR scientific co-ordinator Dr Mark Matfield said, “The more we understand about the basic mechanisms of all the different cancers, the more likely we are to find potential new ways to treat it.
“This is exactly what Dr Miranti has done with her important discoveries about basal and secretory cells in the prostate.”