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2025 William & Darcy Corry – PCF Young Investigator Award

Integrated Profiling of Spatial and Circulating Biomarkers to Optimize Precision Therapy in Advanced Prostate Cancer

Jacob Berchuck, MD
Emory University  

Mentors: Jindan Yu, Matt Freedman 

Description:

  • The median survival for patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) is only 25 months, despite advancement in cancer treatments. Emerging therapies including radioligand therapies, antibody drug conjugates, and CAR-T cell therapies, hold great promise, but there are currently significant clinical barriers in understanding the impact of these therapies. 
  • Dr. Berchuck’s research seeks to optimize precision medicine for patients with mCRPC by using novel high-resolution technologies to precisely identify tumor therapeutic target expression.
  • In this project, Dr. Berchuck will characterize the spatial distribution and co-expression of current and emerging therapeutic targets and their relationship with the tumor immune microenvironment in mCRPC tumor biopsies. This aim will generate a high-resolution atlas of tumor-immune interactions and inform rational pairing of current and emerging therapies. 
  • Furthermore, he will develop and validate tests using patient blood samples (“liquid biopsies”) to predict tumor drug target expression. This will establish a robust strategy for non-invasive assessment of tumor biology to guide treatment selection. 
  • If successful, this project will advance our understanding of tumor-specific drug target expression and develop real-time non-invasive biomarkers to predict therapeutic response, to optimize therapeutic decision making for patients with mCRPC. 

What this means to patients: Advanced prostate cancer is highly variable in biology, and biomarkers and strategies remain urgently needed to guide selection of optimal treatments for individual patients. Dr. Berchuck’s project will establish a scalable precision medicine framework, ensuring that current and emerging targeted therapies for mCRPC are deployed to maximize impact. This work will accelerate the translation of targeted therapies into the clinic and lay the foundation for a future where liquid biopsy biomarkers can optimize therapeutic decision-making and improve outcomes for men living with mCRPC.