Targeted Therapies for Prostate Cancer

So of course, when I was putting together this talk, I asked ChatGPT, What is targeted therapy for prostate cancer? And I thought ChatGPT actually gave an excellent response, much better and much more eloquent than I could have given.

And what ChatGPT said was, in oncology, targeted therapy refers to cancer treatments that are designed to specifically identify and attack molecular features of the cells.

We'll talk a little bit about what those molecular features are.

rather than broadly killing all rapidly dividing cells like traditional chemotherapy does, okay? And so the key idea here is that we're going to need to understand the unique genetic mutations or abnormal proteins that might drive the prostate cancer to grow, And that we're going to build therapies that are targeted to interfere with those specific abnormalities.

And so how does this actually work? So at a very high level, what we're thinking about are what are the mutated genes in prostate cancer, okay? And I've just listed a couple.

There's a gene called P10 that's commonly mutated.

The androgen receptor, which is what testosterone binds to, can be mutated in prostate cancer.

There are going to be overexpressed receptors.

So we just talked.

Ivan just talked about PSMA targeting in prostate cancer, so proteins that are outside on the surface of the prostate cancer cells that we might be able to target, and then various different signaling pathways that might control growth, and we'll talk a little bit about what those might be.