It could pay off with a way to treat cancer cells that have escaped from the prostate and settled elsewhere and no longer depend on male hormones. Those are the ones that kill, and there's no effective treatment for them yet, said Dr. John Petros of the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta.
Doctors do that because prostate cancer initially feeds on androgens.
That treatment is effective only until the cancer returns in a form that does not need androgens, Petros said. However, the cancer cells still produce a bumper crop of proteins called androgen receptors, which latch onto hormone molecules, Petros said. That's where his approach comes in. The idea is to take a gene or gene fragment that can shut off the cancer process in those cells or kill them, tether that gene to a molecule of an androgen hormone, and send the combination into the patient. When one of the hormone parts of the combination contacts an androgen receptor, the cancer cell reacts by dragging the whole thing into its nucleus - right where the therapeutic gene should go, Petros said.