Prostate therapy may boost cancer spread

BALTIMORE, Oct. 1 (UPI) -- Androgen deprivation therapy, which reduces testosterone in the body for prostate cancer patients may encourage the cells to metastasize, a U.S. study found.

In a preliminary study, David Berman of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and colleagues, identified the unsuspected potential problem with treatments that suppress testosterone after discovering that the gene that codes for the protein -- nestin -- was active in lab-grown human prostate cancer cells.

The researchers looked for prostate cancer cells isolated from patients who had died of metastatic prostate cancer -- cancer cells spread out from the prostate tumor -- and found substantial evidence that the nestin gene was active.

Because prostate cancer growth is typically stimulated by testosterone, the treatment is thought to slow tumor growth and weaken the disease. Berman speculates that depriving cells of androgens might also, however, affect nestin expression. The researchers experimented on a prostate cancer cell line that depends on androgens to grow and when they removed androgens from the chemical mixture that the cells live in, their production of nestin increased, the journal Cancer Research reported.