Reinforcing Radiotherapy: can we find new prostate cancer treatment combinations?
Cancer types:
Prostate cancer
Project period:
–
Research institute:
Newcastle University
Award amount:
£212,089
Location:
United Kingdom
Dr Luke Gaughan and his Curestarter team in Newcastle are looking for ways to help radiotherapy work better for more prostate cancer patients. They are exploring a potential new cure and working out which other treatments it could team up with best to attack prostate cancer.
Why is this research needed?
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in the UK and in 2022 there were an estimated 1.47 million people diagnosed with prostate cancer worldwide. Although progress has been made and there are existing treatments for prostate cancer, they don’t always work for all patients, particularly when the disease is advanced.
Dr Luke Gaughan and his team are exploring a potential new prostate cancer therapy to discover which patients it could help best, and which other therapies it could complement to help more people survive this disease for longer.
I am honoured to be thought of as a Curestarter and will be empowered to do everything that I can to drive prostate cancer research forward with support from Worldwide Cancer Research.
What is the science behind this project?
Dr Luke Gaughan is exploring if he can make prostate cancer cells more sensitive to radiotherapy by blocking an enzyme called DNA-PK, which is involved in repairing damaged DNA. If his idea is right, drugs called “DNA-PKIs” that target this enzyme could be powerful new prostate cancer cures.
15 out of every 100 patients with prostate cancer have a particular mutation. The team believe that patients with this mutation, called SPOP, could be good candidates for these drugs. So they will use state of the art models to explore the relationship between SPOP and DNA-PK and test out this idea. They will also investigate if these drugs make prostate cancer cells more susceptible to immunotherapy, opening up the door to powerful new treatment combinations.
The pioneering team are also working with people who had lived through a prostate cancer diagnosis during this project. By sharing their own experiences of therapy and collaborating with the researchers, these incredible people will play a critical role in helping this idea reach the clinic. The good news is that because DNA-KPI drugs already exist and have been through early clinical trials, the path to the clinic should be reasonably quick, meaning new cures could reach patients sooner.
What difference could this project make to patients in the future?
The team hope to show whether drugs called ‘DNA-PKIs’ can work as a prostate cancer treatment and identify which patients they could help the most. They also hope to find out which other treatments these drugs could work well alongside.
This could lead to a vital innovative treatment and brand new treatment combinations for prostate cancer, helping patients worldwide to live longer.
Active Australia
Multiple cancers
This project aims to progress the development of powerful new immunotherapy treatments by uncovering vital new information about how our immune system works.
Researcher: Dr Mireille Lahoud
Boosting the ability of our immune system to better detect and more effectively destroy cancer
Complete Spain
Prostate cancer
Prostate cancer can be very hard to treat when found at a later stage so this project hopes to pave the way towards future cures for these more aggressive cancers.
Researcher: Dr Mariona Graupera
How can healthy cells contribute to aggressive prostate cancer?
Active USA
Breast cancer
This project hopes to develop a new way to identify and target prostate and breast cancer cells in the body using tiny molecular ‘flags’, called minibodies.
Researcher: Dr Tanya Stoyanova
Mini but mighty: Using ‘minibodies’ to detect and treat breast and prostate cancer
Donate today to start new cures
Be part of the united effort to stop lives being cut short by cancer.