PURPOSE: Small-cell prostate carcinoma (SCPC) morphology predicts for a distinct clinical behavior, resistance to androgen ablation, and frequent but short responses to chemotherapy.
We sought to develop model systems that reflect human SCPC and can improve our understanding of its biology.
EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN: We developed a set of castration-resistant prostate carcinomas xenografts and examined their fidelity to their human tumors of origin. We compared the expression and genomic profiles of SCPC and large-cell neuroendocrine carcinoma (LCNEC) xenografts to those of typical prostate adenocarcinoma xenografts. Results were validated immunohistochemically in a panel of 60 human tumors.
RESULTS: The reported SCPC and LCNEC xenografts retain high fidelity to their human tumors of origin and are characterized by a marked upregulation of UBE2C and other mitotic genes in the absence of androgen receptor (AR), retinoblastoma (RB1), and cyclin D1 (CCND1) expression. We confirmed these findings in a panel of samples of CRPC patients. In addition, array comparative genomic hybridization of the xenografts showed that the SCPC/LCNEC tumors display more copy number variations than the adenocarcinoma counterparts. Amplification of the UBE2C locus and microdeletions of RB1 were present in a subset, but none displayed AR nor CCND1 deletions. The AR, RB1, and CCND1 promoters showed no CpG methylation in the SCPC xenografts.
CONCLUSION: Modeling human prostate carcinoma with xenografts allows in-depth and detailed studies of its underlying biology. The detailed clinical annotation of the donor tumors enables associations of anticipated relevance to be made. Future studies in the xenografts will address the functional significance of the findings.
Written by:
Tzelepi V, Zhang J, Lu JF, Kleb B, Wu G, Wan X, Hoang A, Efstathiou E, Sircar K, Navone NM, Troncoso P, Liang S, Logothetis CJ, Maity SN, Aparicio AM. Are you the author?
Department of Genitourinary Medical Oncology, Stanford Alexander Tissue Derivatives Laboratory, David H. Koch Center for Applied Research of Genitourinary Cancers; Departments of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, Pathology, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas; Department of Pathology, University of Patras, Patras, Greece.
Reference: Clin Cancer Res. 2012 Jan 19. [Epub ahead of print]
PubMed Abstract
PMID: 22156612
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