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2020 Emilio Bassini-PCF Young Investigator Award

Elizabeth Wasmuth, PhD

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

Mentors: Charles Sawyers, MD; Sebastian Klinge, PhD

Biochemical, Structural and Molecular Dissection of Androgen Receptor Transcriptional Activity

Description:

  • The androgen receptor (AR) is the central driver of prostate cancer, and androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) has served as backbone for prostate cancer treatment for decades.  Unfortunately, resistance to ADT and to newer and more potent AR-targeting therapies occurs in nearly all patients, even in cancers that continue to be driven by AR.
  • A better understanding of how AR is regulated is critical for developing more effective new treatments for prostate cancer.
  • Dr. Elizabeth Wasmuth is employing various methods to obtain molecular snapshots of AR, in order to better understand how AR activity is regulated, and to design better AR-targeting agents.
  • The elements of AR that interact with other molecules important in prostate cancer and regulate its activity and functions will be identified.
  • The AR-regulating mechanisms identified in these fundamental studies will be applied to preclinical models to validate how these mechanisms affect prostate cancer growth and AR activities.
  • If successful, these studies will identify how AR is regulated on an atomic level and provide a platform for the design of novel AR-targeting therapies.

What this means to patients: Dr. Wasmuth will identify the precise regions of the AR that regulate its oncogenic activities and reveal novel strategies for developing new drugs to target this critical prostate cancer driver.