Amado Zurita

About Amado Zurita

Dr. Zurita’s research goal is to improve the detection of prostate cancer bone metastasis and ultimately to prevent bone metastasis, an event contributing to the lethality of the disease. A clinical challenge is to predict which patients will develop metastatic disease and which will not. Such information would guide clinicians to treat patients with metastatic potential more aggressively. Cadherin-11 is a protein that has been identified as a candidate cell-adhesion molecule required for bone metastasis. Dr. Zurita will evaluate the use of measurement of Cadherin-11 on prostate cancer cells as a predictive marker for bone metastasis. He will also determine whether detection of Cadherin-11 expression levels on circulating tumor cells (cancer cells that have broken away from the tumor and are found in blood) may provide oncologists with a non-invasive assay to predict metastatic potential. A long-term goal is to target Cadherin-11 therapeutically to prevent prostate cancer bone metastasis.