The Prostate Cancer Foundation’s Young Investigator awards encourage the most innovative minds in cancer research to investigate prostate cancer. The Foundation awards selected researchers with $225,000 over three years to help support their research on prostate cancer treatment and patients.

One of the selected researchers, Dr Yap and his mentor Professor Johann de Bono, decided to investigate Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) that have broken away from an existing tumor and entered into the blood stream.

The team’s earlier studies indicated that doctors were able to monitor the level of patient response to new drugs by measuring the levels and molecular characteristics of CTCs in the patients’ blood. At present, doctors have to rely on techniques that are slow to reveal results and may lead to other complications, such as imaging or biopsy, or PSA tests that are not always reliable, in order to evaluate whether a drug is efficient.

Dr. Yap explains:

“This blood test could be used to confirm that the drug is benefiting a particular patient; and, if not, they can be moved quickly to an alternative therapy. This would also mean they suffer fewer side effects from unnecessary treatments and expensive new drugs are not given to patients they cannot help. I am grateful and honored to have received this prestigious award, which will enable us to assess this test in a large-scale clinical trial.”

The increasing availability of more new drugs makes reliable tests even more vital in selecting the appropriate treatment for patients. Until a short while ago only few drugs have been available for men with advanced prostate cancer, but at present, there are six in clinical trials to extend life, including four that have been developed with the help of ICR and The Royal Marsden.

Dr Yap and his team are preparing for a large-scale clinical trial to evaluate the efficacy of CTCs in guiding how individual patients are managed, as well as to establish whether CTCs can be used to predict patient survival.

Prostate cancer is currently still treated as one single disease, despite significant variations in the progression of the disease. Dr. Yap will be setting out to characterize the molecules and sequence genes of individual CTCs, as well as circulating plasma nucleic acids, to establish if certain subtypes of prostate cancer are linked to drug sensitivity and resistance. The team anticipates that this information could be utilized to serve as a more precise personalized treatment for each patient.

In addition, the blood test could also potentially speed up the process of developing new prostate cancer drugs, given that new drugs under the current clinical trial system have to demonstrate that they extend life for longer than those drugs that already exist. This would mean a follow-up period of several years of follow-up would be necessary to achieve conclusive results. The team anticipates that CTC measurements can serve as a prognostic indicator.

In 2011, the Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCF) has awarded 24 Young Investigators grants. PCF chief science officer Dr. Howard Soule comments:

“Young Investigators provide the most innovative and ground-breaking ideas in prostate cancer research. With their fresh ideas, the field of prostate cancer research will be heavily impacted and improved, and lives will be saved.”

Written by Petra Rattue