Work was a team effort led by PCF-funded investigator Dr. Arul Chinnaiyan

PCF's Take: The results of an investigation published by PCF-funded scientists at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center and MD Anderson Cancer Center showed how a class of drugs, PARP inhibitors, might be used to treat almost 50 percent of advanced prostate cancer patients.

PCF-funding in part led to the discovery of gene fusions identified in nearly 50 percent of all prostate cancer cases. These fusions, thought to be drivers of prostate cancer, arise from the genomic rearrangement of two genes (TMPRSS2 and ERG).

The inhibition of biological activity directly inflicted by gene fusions in prostate cancer is complex. Most pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies would consider this to be a “currently un-druggable” target. The ingenious research finding is the discovery of a target associated with gene fusions named PARP that repairs DNA in cancer cells that are undergoing treatment. Based on these findings, inhibitors of PARP are being tested in prostate cancer patients whose tumors are shown to harbor a gene fusion.

This work was a team effort led by PCF-funded investigator Dr. Arul Chinnaiyan of the University of Michigan and 27 additional researchers, including six PCF-funded investigators.

Read the University of Michigan press release
Read the published paper