Uncovering the path to therapy resistance in prostate tumors

For the past 70 years the treatment of choice for advanced, metastatic prostate cancer has been androgen-deprivation therapy. That is, the suppression of circulating testosterone—the hormone that fuels prostate-cancer growth—via surgical castration (orchiectomy) or medical castration with testosterone-blocking drugs. While such therapy buys time for patients, it is not a cure, as inevitably the cancer becomes resistant to the androgen deprivation and continues to grow.

Now, a research team led by Drs. Pete Nelson and Elahe Mostaghel, of the Hutchinson Center, and Drs. Bruce Montgomery and Paul Lange, of the University of Washington School of Medicine, has uncovered what may be the key to understanding how prostate tumors eventually become resistant to androgen-deprivation therapy.

Working with colleagues at the UW and Oregon Health Sciences, the researchers found that testosterone levels were four times higher in metastatic tumors from castrate men (collected immediately after death via rapid autopsy) than in benign and cancerous prostate tissue in men with normal circulating androgen levels (collected at the time of prostate surgery).

“We found that despite the suppression of circulating androgen levels to very low or castrate levels, metastatic prostate tumors are themselves able to maintain significant levels of testosterone, which fuels the growth of the cancer,” said Mostaghel, a clinical-research associate in Nelson’s Human Biology Division laboratory.
 
This finding, reported in the June 1 issue of Cancer Research, could lead to the development of better drugs to treat metastatic disease—cancer that has spread beyond the prostate to distant sites throughout the body, such as bone, lymph nodes and internal organs.

“So far we’ve targeted systemic, or circulating, androgens in men with advanced prostate cancer,” Mostaghel said. “What these findings suggest is that we really need to target the metastatic prostate-tumor tissue itself as the source of tumor androgens.”

In addition to measuring androgen levels in distant tumor sites, the researchers analyzed gene-expression patterns in the metastatic tissue to confirm the presence of genetic pathways that control testosterone production. The researchers indeed found within the metastatic tissue the genetic transcripts necessary for making the proteins that produce testosterone and other androgen hormones.

“We not only found that metastatic-tumor tissues have high enough androgen levels within them to support continued growth of the tumor cells, but also a critically important reason behind why those androgens are there—the discovery that the gene pathways for synthesizing androgens from cholesterol appear to be present in the distant tumor sites. This finding will allow us to start honing in on the specific source of those androgens and how we can eliminate them,” Mostaghel said.

Funding sources for this research included the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense and the Prostate Cancer Foundation.