Discovering biomarkers of treatment response in castration-resistant prostate cancer

Androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) is an important last-line treatment for advanced prostate cancer. ADT initially works well but eventually fails in most patients, leading to castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC). There are currently no effective therapies for CRPC and overall patient survival is poor. To identify better treatments for CRPC, we have performed RNA-sequencing and exome sequencing on a large cohort of patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models of CRPC that have been screened for response to a panel of existing and experimental cancer drugs. This project will develop and apply methods for combining gene expression, mutation and experimental data from PDXs to search for biomarkers that predict response to specific drugs, to identify additional candidate drugs to screen and to shed light on potential mechanisms of drug resistance in prostate cancer. In this way, we aim to develop personalized therapies for CRPC patients to improve their prospects for long-term survival. Students will receive training in bioinformatics, statistics, genomics and cancer biology and work with a team of computational and wet-lab biologists.