Melbourne researchers unlock key to growing prostate tumours in a lab, leading to potential new treatment

AN EXPERIMENTAL drug that appears able to fight prostate cancer has been found after Melbourne scientists overcame testing hurdles.

A MELBOURNE breakthrough in growing and sustaining tumours in the laboratory has led to the discovery that an experimental drug, also developed in Melbourne, may be effective in treating prostate cancer.

The local scientists hope their tumour research can be used to fast-track other potential treatments for prostate cancer, which kills more than 3300 Australian men a year.

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A team from Monash University and Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre has been able to take real tumours from patients and continue to grow them in the lab. Picture: File.

Many potential treatments, when tested in trials on patients, fail to replicate the successful results obtained when they were tested over years on simplified cancer cells artificially grown in the laboratory.

But a team from Monash University and Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre has now been able to take real tumours from patients and continue to grow them in the laboratory.

This allows the efficacy of drugs to be more quickly and accurately tested than before.

More than 20 of these complex tumours, reflecting the diversity of tumours seen in patients, are now surviving in the Melbourne laboratory.

Lead researcher Professor Gail Risbridger, the head of Peter Mac’s prostate cancer program, said the tumour-growing breakthrough could be used by researchers worldwide to shave years off the time it now takes them to develop drug treatments.

“For prostate cancer, it has always been very difficult to keep the tumours alive in a laboratory. But we need to do that, because that is how we test drugs … before we take the drugs into the clinic,” she said.

According to research published on Tuesday in the journal European Urology, the live tumours have provided proof that a drug combination now being tested for blood cancers is also able to suppress the growth of prostate cancer.

The drug, which was developed at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, stops the tumour cells from making the proteins they need to survive.

“It stops the growth of cells that are rapidly growing and dividing, and it seems to work on a range of different types of prostate cancer — on tumours that have come from men with different types of prostate cancer,” Prof Risbridger said.

“The chance that this drug combination worked across quite a few of them (tumour types) was surprising. (It) was able to treat more types of aggressive cancer than we would have expected,” she said.

The Melbourne researchers are hoping to begin clinical trials of the drug on prostate cancer patients.

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