The prostate cancer program at the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and UCLA Health was awarded a $8.7 million SPORE grant from NCI.
The grant will support the development of approaches for improving the diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of prostate cancer.
The 2019 designation is the fourth time UCLA has received the five-year cycle of funding. The UCLA program is one of eight programs with this designation and the only one to be awarded the designation in the state of California.
The grant helped support the work of Michael Jung, a UCLA distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and Charles Sawyers, a former professor of medicine and molecular pharmacology at UCLA. They developed enzalutamide and apalutamide, anti-androgen treatments that can prolong life for men when hormone and chemotherapies did not work for them. These drugs have been used by thousands of men with castration-resistant prostate cancer.
Developments in imaging for detecting prostate cancer have also been supported through the grant. UCLA was among the first places in the country to employ MRI for detection, diagnosis and management of prostate cancer. MRIs are now regularly used to detect and assess the aggressiveness of malignant prostate tumors.
Over the next five years, the grant will fund three translational research projects to find better ways to treat men with advanced stages of the disease:
Developing drug inhibitors for men with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer.
Led by Jung and Matthew Rettig, the team will look to develop a drug inhibitor that helps minimize resistance, prolong life expectancy and improve quality of life for men with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. This stage of prostate cancer accounts for virtually all prostate cancer-specific deaths.Using CAR T-cell therapy to treat men with advanced prostate cancer.
Working with researchers at City of Hope, Owen Witte and colleagues will test a new CAR T-cell targeting the prostate stem cell antigen in prostate cancer. The team has engineered and tested the CAR T-cell therapy in laboratory models of prostate cancer and will bring them to a human clinical trial to test its efficiency.Targeting a protein to help inhibit lethal prostate cancer.
The project, led by Isla Garraway from UCLA and Michael Freeman from Cedars Sinai, will test if the protein ONECUT2 is a target in a subset of aggressive prostate cancers where ONECUT2 is highly active. Currently, most drugs in development to treat advanced prostate cancer are focused on targeting the androgen receptor, which many men still do not benefit from.
