14 DAY TRIAL // A group of investigators from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) announced recently that it managed to discover the cell of origin for prostate cancer. The discovery has tremendously important implications, given that it may open the way to creating new and advanced drugs for fighting off this terrible disease. Novel prediction methods and diagnostics tools may also become available to oncologists and other healthcare experts, the team behind the investigation believes.
For many years, cancer experts believed that a type of cells called luminal cells were the ones responsible for the onset of prostate cancer. There were good reasons for investigators to believe this, given that the tumors which developed resembled luminal cells in structure. But the new data, discovered by experts at the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, show that basal cells found in the benign prostate tissue may in fact be the main source of prostate cancer cells. In recent experiments conducted on unsuspecting lab mice, the team demonstrated that rodents with a suppressed immune system developed this type of condition starting with the basal cells.
“Certainly, the dominant thought is that human prostate cancer arose from the luminal cells because the cancers had more features resembling luminal cells. But we were able to start with a basal cell and induce human prostate cancer, and now, as we go forward, this gives us a place to look in understanding the sequence of genetic events that initiates prostate cancer and defining the cell-signaling pathways that may be at work fueling the malignancy, helping us to potentially uncover new targets for therapy, explains Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator Dr. Owen Witte, who was the senior author of the investigation.
He is also the director of the UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center, and a member of the Jonsson. His paper appears in the July 30 issue of the esteemed peer-reviewed journal Science. “Because of the widespread belief that luminal cells were the root of human prostate cancer, it would have been those cells examined and targeted to treat the disease. This study tells us that basal cells play an important role in the prostate cancer development process and should be an additional focus of targeted therapies,” UCLA graduate student Anhdrew Goldsten believes. He is the first author of the research, which was funded by the Prostate Cancer Foundation Challenge Award, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the US Department of Defense (DOD).