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research Researcher targets prostate cancer After earning his medical degree and working at the John Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Kenneth Pienta, MD, returned to his home state of Michigan in the mid-1990s, where he has since developed a prostate cancer research lab at the University of Michigan and treated patients with advanced diagnoses. "Basically what I do here is bench-to-bedside medicine," he says. "This mean that we want to make discoveries in the laboratory and translate them into treatments as fast as possible."  In 2003, Pienta received a prestigious, five-year American Cancer Society Clinical Research Professor grant for his ongoing work related to the thrombin receptor, considered a molecular key to facilitating the spread of prostate cancer.Now Pienta and his colleagues are striving to develop treatments that thwart the receptor’s influence in a cancer that is the second most common malignancy in men after skin cancer; an estimated 234,000 cases of prostate cancer will be diagnosed this year. He currently serves as director of the urologic cancers program at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor. Q: What’s unique about prostate cancer’s development? A: Unlike other cancers, prostate cancer can take up to 30 years to develop--it’s often a slow-growing disease. If a man lives long enough, he’s going to get it. If you look at the prostate of an 80-year-old man, virtually 100 percent of the time he’ll have some cancer cells. But only one out of every six men will develop prostate cancer that may require treatment. Of those one in six, we think somewhere between 80 to 90 percent will be cured or will live a long life and die of something else. But once the cancer develops and gets out of the prostate, it grows quickly and is likely to go to the bone. One of the big questions is how do we find the prostate cancers that are clinically important and need to be treated versus those that can be left alone. Q: What is the best way to catch it early? A: The safest thing is to use the American Cancer Society guideline. Q: Tell us more about your research in particular. A: My lab is interested in understanding mechanisms in which prostate cancer spreads to the bone. It causes a special effect that rearranges the bone, causing pain and other problems like fractures. If we can understand why and how cancer cells spread, or metastasize, we can interrupt that process. And we can develop targeted treatments. One molecular link we have identified is a thrombin receptor, located on the cell’s surface, which influences the spread of prostate cancer. Q: How does this receptor work? A: First, a little background. The body recognizes when cells no longer work properly, automatically self-destructing those cells. But cancer cells have found a way to escape that self-destruct button. The thrombin receptor, we believe, basically puts a shield over that self-destruct button so you can’t hit it. We’ve found that by blocking the thrombin receptor, it’s easier to kill the cancer cells with chemotherapy. We are looking at several potential treatments to inhibit that receptor. Q: What breakthroughs do you project within the next 10 years? I think that in 10 years, if we haven’t found a cure, we will at least have found a set of treatments. ©Reprinted from Triumph magazine, with permission of Pace Communications, Inc. and the American Cancer Society. | |
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