When prostate cancer tumours spread to a distant site in the body, the tumour cells enter the blood stream. Once in the blood we call these circulating tumour cells or CTCs. Not all CTCs in a patient’s blood will be able to result in distant metastasis and in fact in the case of prostate cancer only approximately 10-15% will. Yet we can detect CTCs in both metastatic and non-metastatic patients. What makes a CTC from a metastatic patient different to that from a non-metastatic patient? Are there chaperone cells that aid in the CTCs entry into a distant tissue such as the bone and ultimately facilitates the development of metastasis? One of these cell types is bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells or BM-MSCs for short. Normally BM-MSCs play a role in producing the cells that build the bone. However we believe that in metastatic prostate cancer these BM-MSCs interact with the metastatic prostate cancer cells to help them grow in the bone. We also believe that the BM-MSC can exit the bone and enter a patient’s blood, where it binds to the CTCs and helps them to spread to the bone. This proposal seeks to determine if we can isolate CTC and BM-MSCs from the blood of prostate cancer patients and determine if they can be grown to allow further investigation. Understanding this will help us to develop new assays to investigate the nature of these interactions and identify new therapeutic strategies to treat metastatic prostate cancer.
