RNS: Prostate biomarker, February 2009
TIME: 2:39
URL: http://www2.med.umich.edu/prmc/media/newsroom/details.cfm?ID=1048
U-M Health Minute: Today’s top health issues and medical research
Researchers discover metabolite linked to aggressive prostate cancer
Finding could lead to test to help guide treatment decisions
Suggested lead: Each year, about 200-thousand men are diagnosed with prostate cancer. Currently, it is very difficult to know when prostate cancer will require aggressive treatment to prevent it from spreading or when a wait-and-see approach is advisable for the patient. Here is Andi McDonnell with more.
Researchers from the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center have identified a panel of small molecules, or metabolites, that appear to indicate aggressive prostate cancer.
The finding could lead to a simple test that would help doctors determine which prostate cancers are slow-growing and which require immediate, aggressive treatment.
Results of the study appear in the Feb. 12 issue of Nature.
Senior study author Dr, Arul Chinnaiyan, (M.D., Ph.D.), director of the Michigan Center for Translational Pathology and S.P. Hicks Endowed Professor of Pathology at the U-M Medical School tells us . . .
“One of the major challenges when men are diagnosed with prostate cancer is really telling whether they have the more aggressive form of the disease that metastasizes and spreads, versus the more slow-growing disease.”
“What that results in is that we end up over-treating our patient because the physicians can’t tell whether they have the aggressive disease or the slow growing version of prostate cancer.”
The researchers looked at 1,126 metabolites across 262 samples of tissue, blood or urine associated with benign prostate tissue, early stage prostate cancer and advanced, or metastatic, prostate cancer. They mapped the alterations in metabolites and identified about 10 that were present more often in prostate cancer than in the benign cells and were present most often in the advanced cancer samples.
Chinnaiyan explains . . .
“When we’re looking at metabolites we’re actually looking several steps beyond genes and proteins. We’re actually looking at the end products of genes and proteins so it allows us to very deeply look at actually some of the functions of the cells and some of the biochemistry that occurs during cancer development.”
One metabolite in particular, sarcosine, appeared to be one of the strongest indicators of advanced disease. In the study, sarcosine was a better indicator of advancing disease than the traditional prostate specific antigen, or PSA, test that is currently used to monitor or screen for prostate cancer. Sarcosine was detected in the urine, which has researchers hopeful that a simple urine test could be used.
Chinnaiyan tells us . . .
“In this particular study we focused on prostate cancer but some of our unpublished findings suggest that other common solid tumors, including breast cancer, may also have similar metabolites elevated in the more aggressive forms of the disease. So we believe that the research focused on prostate cancer potentially will have implications in other common solid tumors.”
Andi McDonnell, U-M Health System News
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