Feel-Good Friday

This week’s Feel-Good Friday concerns an issue that affects me, and has affected me for a few years. Most of you know my issues with prostate specific antigens (PSAs) and the prostate biopsies I have had. Thankfully, they haven’t found any cancer – yet – but I still need checkups at least twice a year.

Now, Washington School of Medicine in Saint Louis found an RNA molecule which shuts down prostate tumors.

The scientists found that prostate cancers develop ways to shut down this RNA molecule to allow themselves to grow. However, when they implanted mice with human prostate tumor samples, the new treatment restored this so-called long noncoding RNA—and they’ve hailed it as a new strategy to treat the cancer which has developed resistance to hormonal therapies.

I cannot stress enough how much I hope this molecule can stifle cancer tumors. I do not enjoy prostate biopsies; they’re painful and they’re humiliating, especially when a nurse is in the room.

“In prostate cancer, the androgen receptor is very clever,” said Mahajan, who is also a research member of Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine.

“Our research shows that it suppresses its own suppressor; essentially it binds to NXTAR and shuts it down. This means that in all the prostate cancer samples that we study, we rarely find NXTAR, because it is suppressed by the heavy presence of the androgen receptor in these types of tumors. We discovered NXTAR by using a drug that my lab developed that suppresses the androgen receptor. When the androgen receptor is suppressed, NXTAR starts to appear. When we saw this, we suspected that we had discovered a tumor suppressor.”

Please, please please, let this be true. At this point I am almost expecting the cancer is eventually going to catch me. It would be nice if there were alternative treatments besides constant biopsies.