Precision medicine strategies for lethal prostate cancer: from metabolism to cell communication.

Precision medicine strategies for lethal prostate cancer: from metabolism to cell communication.

During tumorigenesis, cancer cells overcome biological challenges such as moving across and escaping from the primary tumor, acquiring therapy-resistance and colonizing distal organs. The success of this process relies on adaptability, a skill that is nourished by cell-autonomous and non-cell autonomous mechanisms, that molecularly shape cell secretomes that alter cell communication and create pro-invasive tumor microenvironments.

In the European Union, prostate cancer (PCa) exhibits the highest incidence among cancer types in men and represents the third cause of death by cancer in the gender. This mortality is due to the appearance of metastasis since these patients lack effective therapeutic alternatives. Given this situation, in our laboratory at UPV/EHU we aim at: (1) Understanding the fundamental mechanisms of PCa aggressiveness. (2) Developing tools to detect those patients molecularly committed to develop lethal PCa. (3) Opening new windows of therapeutic opportunities based on precision medicine strategies. By implementing in silico and experimental transcription analysis, mouse modelling and multiOMIC functional approaches, we are exploring the impact of several PCa-related genes in disease aggressiveness and, specifically for the seminar, to assess the potential of secreted factors as “lighthouses” of novel therapeutic strategies against PCa.