Some prostate cancer patients develop an advanced and aggressive form of the disease – castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) – that stops responding to standard therapies. CRPC is currently lethal because there are no effective therapies available to treat it. One strategy often used for cancer treatment is to activate the body’s own defence mechanisms (immune system) against tumours, but CRPC is hard to target because it does not have enough active anti-tumour immune cells inside it.
Ágata and colleagues in the Oxford Prostate Cancer Biology Group, led by Professor Ian Mills, found that an enzyme called NNMT not only contributes to the aggressiveness of a specific CRPC subtype (CRPC-SCL), but can also be released to the tumour’s surroundings and interact with immune cells. Recently published data in the International Journal of Biological Sciences, shows that NNMT is secreted by CRPC-SCL models, and the researcher now wants to determine what it interacts with in that context, and how it is preventing immune cells to recognise and eliminate prostate tumour cells.
Ágata’s MSCA Fellowship application scored in the top 5% best research proposals in a pool of 3368 applications to the Life Sciences panel. This success follows the awarding of a one-year CRUK Oxford Centre OCION Pump Prime Grant of approximately £20K to work on the same project.
Commenting on her success, Ágata said: ‘At a personal level, being awarded this fellowship will allow me to continue building on my previous work on NAD(H) metabolism and NNMT in prostate cancer - which I am very passionate about - while reinforcing my independent line of research and bringing me one step closer to my long-term goal of establishing my own research group. More importantly, I honestly believe that this project’s outputs may have a meaningful impact on the treatment of prostate cancer patients, and I am very excited to have the opportunity to work on it.’