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2023 Chris and Katia Oberbeck – PCF Young Investigator Award

Uncovering Novel Biomarkers in Localized Prostate Cancer Through Radiomics and Digital Pathology

David D. Yang, MD
Harvard: Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI)

Mentors: Eliezer Van Allen, Paul Nguyen, Martin King

Description:

  • Current guidelines for risk-stratifying patients with localized prostate cancer are based on clinical and pathologic data. This information is used to identify patients at elevated risk of disease recurrence and guide treatment recommendations.
  • However, the performance of current clinical risk-stratification systems, even when combined with information from molecular biomarker tests, is limited, and many patients experience overtreatment or undertreatment. Improved biomarker strategies to guide treatment decisions in patients with localized prostate cancer are urgently needed.
  • David D. Yang is investigating the application of AI methods to medical imaging and digitized histopathology slides to improve risk stratification in patients with localized prostate cancer.
  • In this project, Dr. Yang and team will develop and utilize AI methods that can predict the risk of prostate cancer recurrence from multi-parametric MRI scans and digitized histopathology slides from prostate tumors.
  • In addition, whether AI algorithms can be developed to predict the presence of certain genomic alterations from multi-parametric MRI scans and pathology slides will be investigated. Specifically, Dr. Yang will study whether these models can identify tumors with DNA damage repair alterations, which may identify patients who could benefit from treatment with PARP inhibitors or other therapies.
  • If successful, this project will result in new AI-based biomarkers that use MRI or pathology images to better risk-stratify patients at the time of diagnosis and improve personalized management plans.

What this means to patients: Current clinical tools for risk-stratifying patients with localized prostate cancer are suboptimal, resulting in patients being overtreated or undertreated, which negatively impacts their disease outcomes or quality of life. Dr. Yang and team will develop new AI-based tools that use MRI scans or digitized histopathology images to better identify patients at elevated risk for disease recurrence and with DNA-repair defects, for whom treatment intensification strategies may be worthwhile to investigate. This could greatly improve outcomes for patients with localized prostate cancer.