Ruben Raychaudhuri receives Young Investigator Award

Dr. Ruben Raychaudhuri, assistant professor (Hematology and Oncology) is a recipient of a Young Investigator Award from the Prostate Cancer Foundation for his work investigating epigenetic features of aggressive prostate cancer that could lead to more personalized care and better results from existing therapies.

Using epigenetic changes to make an existing therapy better

Raychaudhuri and colleagues will test an epigenetic approach that could make a recently approved therapy more effective in aggressive prostate cancer by increasing the contrast between tumor cells and normal tissue.

Prostate specific membrane antigens (PSMA) are useful molecules for diagnosis and therapy because they are dramatically overproduced in aggressive cancer and easy to find on the surface of cells, like beacons that provide sharp contrast between tumors and normal tissue.

A recently approved radiotherapy attacks aggressive prostate cancer by homing in on PSMA. But only 50% of patients respond to this therapy, in part, because PSMA levels in some tumor cells are too low.

Raychaudhuri and colleagues have discovered that blocking one of the DNA methylation enzymes with a drug can boost levels of PSMA, making the cell more visible to the radiotherapy that targets them.