A One-Two Punch for Prostate Cancer
New therapy combines inhibition of dual biological pathways to shrink previously untreatable tumors
More men get prostate cancer in the US than any other form of the disease outside of non-melanoma skin cancer. Around 3.5 million men live with prostate cancer, with 330,000 new diagnoses each year, according to the American Cancer Society. Over 36,000 men die from the disease annually.
The good news is that prostate cancer is treatable, especially when diagnosed early: the survival rate five years after diagnosis is a whopping 97.7 percent, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The bad news is that the rate falls to only 37.9 percent when the disease has spread. Moreover, treatment of the disease through hormone therapy can have deleterious side effects. For prostate cancer that does not respond, there is no effective treatment.
Now, help may be on the way. By targeting two particular biological pathways in cancer cells simultaneously, researchers for the first time were able not only to stop the growth of castration-resistant prostate cancer but also to shrink existing tumors. The work, led by biologist Rhea Sahu, PhD ’25, during her doctoral research at Harvard Griffin GSAS, Harvard Medical School, and Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, was published recently in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
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