By Stephen Beech via SWNS A potential new treatment for an aggressive form of prostate cancer 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 University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center first identified a new subtype of aggressive prostate cancer , 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 Cell Reports Medicine , 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 prostate cancer , 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 some ovarian cancers .
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 prostate cancers . Senior author Profe.