Prostate Cancer

Principal investigator Arul Chinnaiyan, M.D., Ph.D., will lead a $4 million project that will employ a suite of cutting-edge drug development techniques to develop an effective inhibitor of MYC, a major driver of about 70% of all cancers, including prostate cancer.

In the face of conflicting evidence over the risks and benefits of routine prostate cancer screenings, a large, longitudinal analysis found Veterans Health Administration (VA) medical centers with lower prostate screening rates had higher rates of metastatic prostate cancer cases in subsequent years than centers with higher screening rates.

Drugs like enzalutamide that inhibit male hormones from activating the androgen receptor have been used to treat advanced prostate cancer for more than a decade. While successful in most cases, these drugs can eventually stop working, but there is a limited understanding about how this change occurs.

Men with advanced prostate cancer taking abiraterone or enzalutamide plus hormone therapy were at higher risk of serious medical issues than their peers undergoing hormone therapy alone.

In 2005, Arul Chinnaiyan, M.D., Ph.D., and his lab found when a gene regulated by androgens called TMPRSS2 fuses with a transcription factor called ERG, it triggers the development of prostate cancer. This gene fusion was the first ever identified in solid tumors. In the nearly two decades since, the Chinnaiyan lab has refined its discovery, understanding how the hormone androgen regulates this gene fusion and developing a urine-based screening test to better detect prostate cancer.

Arul M. Chinnaiyan, M.D., Ph.D., was awarded the 2022 Sjöberg Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which also awards Nobel Prizes. Chinnaiyan is being honored for the discovery of recurrent gene fusions in prostate cancer, a groundbreaking finding initially published in 2005 that has led to a better understanding of how prostate cancer develops and improved methods to detect the disease.

Researchers led by the University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center started with a simple thread: an inhibitor that showed promise against metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer cells. This is the most challenging type of prostate cancer – advanced disease that has become resistant to hormone-based treatment.

The Urine Prostate Seq test, or UPSeq for short, uses next-generation genomic sequencing to analyze urine collected from men following a digital rectal exam.

The MyProstateScore test measures levels of cancer-specific genes in a patient’s urine. It's based on U-M research that half of all prostate tumors harbor a certain genetic anomaly in which the genes TMPRSS2 and ERG relocate on a chromosome and fuse together -- creating an on-switch for prostate cancer development.