For the unlucky 10% of men diagnosed with prostate cancer who have the most aggressive form, the prognosis is grim. The available prostate cancer drugs may initially shrink their tumors, but the remaining cancer cells usually grow out of control again after a couple of years. These drug-resistant cases account for most of the nearly 29,000 annual deaths in the United States from prostate cancer.
Researchers led by Charles Sawyers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City have now developed a compound that could prevent some of the deaths. This Thursday, they will report online in Science that in mice the compound shrank implanted human prostate tumors untreatable with current drugs and that it showed signs of arresting tumor growth in men with similarly drug-resistant cancer. Although more clinical studies are needed, cancer researchers are excited about the potential drug, which tackles prostate cancer by a mechanism different from that of current drugs. "It's possibly a new and better way of treating prostate cancer," says oncologist Philip Kantoff of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.
Read entire story at Science Magazine.
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