Pathology, Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of Michigan, 7303 Cancer Center, 1500 East Medical Center Drive, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109-5946, United States.
Bone is the most common metastatic site for prostate cancer, and osseous metastases are the leading cause of morbidity from this disease. Recent autopsy studies prove that 100% of men who die of prostate cancer have bone involvement. Understanding the biology of prostate cancer and its evolution to an incurable androgen independent phenotype requires an understanding of the genetic and cellular alterations that lead to the seeding and proliferation of tumor foci in bone, as well as the microenvironment in which these metastases arise. No intensive studies, however, have been conducted on osseous metastatic tissues from patients with metastatic prostate cancer due to lack of access to such tissues for profiling and other research.
We demonstrate, for the first time, a reproducible methodology to obtain high quality clinical tumor tissues metastatic to the bone. This technique allowed the procurement of viable metastatic tumor tissue from involved bones in 13 recent autopsies conducted at the University of Michigan, and analyzed the gene expression of these tissues using real time PCR and microarrays.
We present here the discovery of non-ossified bone metastases from multiple patients with advanced prostate cancer and their subsequent characterization and comparison to non-osseous metastases from the same patients
This represents a versatile and practical approach that may be employed to characterize the steps in metastasis and the phenotypic characteristics of osseous metastasis of prostate cancer and to profile RNA, DNA and cDNA from tumor samples metastatic to the bone.
Written by:
Mehra R, Kumar-Sinha C, Lonigro RJ, Shankar S, Jing X, Phillips NE, Han B, Cao X, Smith DC, Shah RB, Chinnaiyan AM, Pienta KJ. Are you the author?
Reference: Clin Cancer Res. 2011 May 9. Epub ahead of print.
doi: 10.1158/1078-0432.CCR-10-3120
PubMed Abstract
PMID: 21555375
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