benjamin lehman A potential new treatment for an aggressive form of has shown promise in lab tests. American scientists have shown how a gene alteration drives the disease and have also discovered a potential "degrader" that stops it. They have managed to destroy tumors in mice.
However, the team says the treatment is still at a "pre-clinical" stage and further tests are needed before human trials can take place. When researchers at the first identified a new subtype of aggressive , they knew they needed to understand how the genetic alteration was driving cancer and how to target it with treatment. In two new papers, both published in the journal , the team describes the mechanisms of how alterations in the CDK12 gene drive prostate cancer development and reports on a promising degrader that targets CDK12 and a related gene to destroy tumors.
Researchers previously found loss of the CDK12 gene in about 7% of patients with metastatic , suggesting the alteration may be linked to a more aggressive form of the disease. That was discovered from DNA and RNA sequencing from patient tumor samples. CDK12 also plays a role in .
To understand how CDK12 loss impacts cells on a molecular level, the Michigan researchers created a mouse model to try to parallel the genetic alterations they were seeing in human . (Photo by Pixabay via Pexels) Senior author Professor Arul Chinnaiyan said: “What was quite surprising was when we created CDK12 loss in a mouse prostate, this caused precursor l.
