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.
Immunotherapy combinations
Prostate cancer is notoriously resistant to immunotherapy because it is an immunologically “cold” tumor, with many suppressive signals to block an effective anti-tumor response. By uncovering the mechanisms behind immunotherapy responses and resistance, we can better rationally develop combination treatments to improve outcomes.
The goals of this project are to:
- Identify novel correlative markers for responsiveness to combined immune checkpoint blockade (anti-CTLA-4 plus anti-PD-[L]1).
- Therapeutically modulate immunosuppressive myeloid cells with a CSF1R antagonist.