Prostate Cancer Research Projects
MOON SHOTS PROGRAM
Prostate Cancer Flagship Projects
The Prostate Cancer Moon Shot® is attacking prostate cancer from multiple angles, giving MD Anderson the best chance of making research breakthroughs that will help patients now and in the future. Our team is committed to bringing cures to more patients by developing new treatments for aggressive subtypes of the disease and overcoming obstacles for effective immunotherapy approaches.
Overcoming resistance
Developing a better understanding of—and treatments for—aggressive-variant prostate cancer
Aggressive-variant prostate cancer (AVPC) is a subtype of the disease that is no longer responsive to standard hormone therapies. These cancers are driven by different biological pathways and patients with AVPC tend to have poor outcomes. We are working to better our understanding of the disease’s biology in order to develop treatments for patients with AVPC.
The goals of this flagship are to:
- Apply single-cell analyses to learn how prostate cancer adapts and changes in response to ongoing treatment with androgen receptor (AR) inhibitors.
- Define relevant subsets of AVPC in order to clarify why it becomes resistant to available treatments and to reveal new vulnerabilities for more effective treatment approaches.
Harnessing immunotherapy
Identifying predictors of immunotherapy response and designing novel therapeutic approaches
Prostate cancer is notoriously resistant to immunotherapy, but our researchers are working to discover why. By uncovering the mechanisms behind immunotherapy responses, we can better predict which patients are most likely to respond to immune checkpoint inhibitors and develop combination treatments to improve outcomes.
The goals of this flagship are to:
- Characterize immune signals in patients that respond to checkpoint blockade inhibitors to identify selective biomarkers that can predict which patients will benefit from immunotherapy.
- Explore approaches to overcome the adaptive resistance to ipilimumab (anti-CTLA-4) by testing combination therapy approaches and targeting pathways that dampen the immune response.