Kamlesh Yadav

About Kamlesh Yadav

Understanding the biology of how prostate cancer cells develop resistance to drugs, and how different drugs interact with one another will lead to the development of drug combinations that significantly delay or even prevent drug resistance and disease progression.

Dr. Kamlesh Yadav will test the hypothesis that resistance emerges faster against synergistic drug combinations compared with antagonistic drug combinations. He will test the efficacy of pair-wise combinations of commonly used drugs in prostate cancer cell lines to determine which drug-pairs are synergistic or antagonistic (the combined effect of the drugs being respectively greater or less than the sum of the inhibitory activities of the individual drugs), and how these combinations affect the emergence of drug resistant tumors.

Cell lines that develop resistance to single drugs or combinations will be assessed for genomic mutations to identify the involved genes. Combinations of drugs to which resistance emerges through non-overlapping mechanisms will be tested for their efficacy in cell lines and mouse models.

Finally, clinical trials will be initiated to test the most promising combinations in castration-resistant prostate cancer patients.

What this means for patients: The development of drug resistance by prostate cancer cells leads to an untreatable form of this disease. Dr. Yadav will identify drug resistance mechanisms to commonly prescribed prostate cancer medications to develop therapeutic combinations that will delay or prevent the development of lethal, drug-resistant prostate cancer.