Centre for Urological Research

Inhibin and cancer

One of the most intractable aspects of prostate cancer treatment and therapy is determining which patients will develop life-threatening metastatic cancer and thus require therapeutic intervention from those patients with relatively latent disease who would benefit from a non-intervention approach. There is, therefore, an urgent need for new markers to distinguish between these two groups. We propose the hypothesis that inhibin alpha subunit, a tumor suppressor gene, is tumor promoting and pro-metastatic in advanced prostate cancer. Studies in our lab will seek to establish a relationship between elevated inhibin alpha subunit expression levels and metastasis in both animal models and in human prostate tissues.