Winning The Prostate Cancer War
Men's Health South Africa|May 2018

There may be new hope – and new treatments – for men with deadly tumours.

Julie Stewart
Winning The Prostate Cancer War

One day several years ago, Samuel Denmeade, a professor of oncology and urology at Johns Hopkins University, received a phone call from his home state of Ohio. The man on the other end was J. Bruce Hunsicker, a lawyer with prostate cancer who had started a foundation to raise money for research into the disease. He wanted to connect with Dr. Denmeade, a leader in the field.

Hunsicker’s non-profit organisation, the One-in-Six Foundation, eventually gave funding to Dr. Denmeade’s lab. Although Hunsicker died of prostate cancer in 2010, his tenacity lives on. “It was inspiring to me to keep him in mind as we try to do all this stuff to make a difference and not make a profit,” Dr. Denmeade says.

Dr. Denmeade has invested that money into a crazy idea that flips conventional wisdom about prostate cancer on its head.

Doctors have long looked to the hormone testosterone as a piece of the prostate cancer puzzle. Back in the 1940s, Dr. Charles Huggins, a professor at the University of Chicago, found that he could kill prostate cancer cells if he blocked testosterone production. Since then, oncologists have used a testosterone-reducing treatment known as androgen deprivation therapy in men with advanced prostate cancer. Kill the T, kill the cancer – or so the theory goes, because the cancer lives on androgen receptors that testosterone binds to.

In the lab, however, Dr. Denmeade’s team found that the link between testosterone and prostate cancer may be more complex. When they exposed testosterone-starved cancer cells to a sudden high dose of T, the cancer was suppressed. That T influx, it seemed, might shock the cells and break their DNA.

This story is from the May 2018 edition of Men's Health South Africa.

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This story is from the May 2018 edition of Men's Health South Africa.

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