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Prostate Cancer Finding Promising UNMC Research May Lead to Treatments to Keep the Disease From Spreading to Bones.

Posted on: Tuesday, 17 May 2005, 21:00 CDT

Researchers at the University of Nebraska Medical Center have identified a mechanism that allows prostate cancer to invade bones in rodents -- a finding that paves the way for treatments to prevent similar destruction in humans.

The discovery was published as the cover story of the May issue of the journal Cancer Cell, which was released online Monday.

The finding stands to be important. Prostate cancer kills about 30,000 men in the United States each year, primarily when the cancer has spread to the bone. Tumors in the bone are notoriously painful and often are resistant to treatment.

Rakesh Singh, an associate professor of pathology and microbiology, and Mitsuru Futakuchi, a visiting Japanese professor and postdoctoral research fellow, headed the portion of the research done at UNMC.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., and Nagoya City University Medical School in Japan also were involved in the five-year study.

Singh said Futakuchi placed prostate cancer tumors on bones in rodents to "basically mimic the changes which we usually see in bone metastases of prostate cancer in humans."

UNMC researchers identified the genes expressed in bone destruction in those rodents, and scientists in Tennessee helped study some of the mechanisms at play.

Collectively, they found that an enzyme called MMP-7 turned a normally harmless molecule into a substance that promoted bone deterioration and allowed tumor growth.

Singh said the finding suggests that drugs to inhibit MMP-7 eventually could help prostate cancer patients. Such drugs have been tested on other cancers with disappointing results, but they haven't been tested on prostate cancer in the bone.

He said the same enzyme may also be at work in breast cancer, another cancer that commonly spreads to bone.

Already, UNMC is studying that possibility in mice, Singh said. "We are trying to find if it is the same mechanism."

It will take several years before the finding could lead to human treatments, if any.

Singh said researchers and clinicians would need to study the mechanism in prostate cancer patients, develop and test treatments on rodents and humans, and secure approval for any that proved successful.

Source: Omaha World - Herald

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