Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer in American men and the second leading cause of cancer deaths.
When prostate cancer spreads to other parts of the body, it becomes harder to treat and more dangerous.
In a recent study from Washington State University, researchers found that a way that prostate cancer cells can hijack the body’s bone maintenance.
This can trigger the spread of bone cancers in 90% of prostate-cancer fatalities.
The team found a particular enzyme called MAOA can activate a cascade of signals that made it easier for tumor cells to invade and grow in bone.
When they reduced this enzyme in prostate cancer cells, they found a lower prostate cancer bone metastasis.
The study is published in Cancer Cell.
Besides the enzyme, another trigger of the spread of prostate cancer is a specific gene in prostate tumors called the NSD2 gene.
Researchers from Rutgers University found that the gene indicates when patients are at high risk for cancer to spread.
When they turned off the gene in the cancer cells, they effectively reduce the spread of prostate cancer.
The study is published in Nature Communications.
In a third study, researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine developed a new drug to prevent metastatic prostate cancer.
They found that treating human prostate cancer cells with a drug that targets a protein called PHLPP2 may prevent the cancer cells from spreading to other organs in the body.
They focused on the levels of MYC, an oncogenic protein that can cause many types of cancer that cannot be treated with conventional drugs.
One type of cancer linked to elevated MYC levels in the body is metastatic prostate cancer. the researchers found that the protein PHLPP2 is also elevated in metastatic prostate cancer cells.
The team found that these cancer cells require PHLPP2 to survive and proliferate. When the Phlpp2 gene was deleted in mice, the prostate cancer cells could be prevented from metastasizing to other organs.
They used a drug that inhibits PHLPP2 and found this could reduce MYC levels and make the cancer cells to stop proliferating and die.
This finding may help develop a new method to prevent metastatic prostate cancer and other types of drug-resistant cancer.
The study is published in the Journal of Cell Biology.
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