Are circulating tumor cells a future weapon in the fight against castration resistant prostate cancer?
Abstract
Prostate cancer is currently the second most frequent oncologic disease and the most frequent urological tumor in men in the Czech Republic. Almost 20% of patients develop castration resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) which has bad prognosis and 85% of them die from bone metastases.
The aim of the project is to measure the presence of the circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in the peripheral blood of CRPC patients and subsequently use these results to evaluate the effect of the treatment and to estimate the prognosis of a patient. Our results show that almost all CRPC patients are CTCs positive at the time of diagnosis.
Moreover, CTCs are highly heterogeneous in gene expression. By comparing the results of the CRPC patients with the results of the patients with BPH we can conclude that the high PSA expression in CTCs is not connected to the high PSA level in serum.
From the first results it seems probable that CTCs could serve as a powerful biomarker for monitoring of CRPC progress and therapy efficiency.