New outlooks for prostate cancer patients at an advanced stage.
«With repeated blood tests it is possible to keep the situation under control and carry out a personalized treatment. This allows to have a more effective treatment and potentially improve the quality and life expectancy of patients». This is the conclusion of the latest study carried out by Francesca Demichelis, researcher in Precision Medicine at Cibio – Centro di biologia integrata (centre of integrated biology) at the University of Trento.
This study is considered interesting at an international level and was published on 17th September by “Science Translational Medicine”, an online journal included among the broader group of journals captained by “Science".
Demichelis’ work confirms the effectiveness of the treatment and opens up to new options for a personalized treatment and better life quality and expectancy for prostate cancer patients thanks to regular blood tests. Regular tests in fact allow to check on the evolution or regression of the cancer during the period of medical treatment.
Francesca Demichelis is senior co-author of the article that reports the results of a study carried out on men with prostate cancer with metastasis (the original title is “Tumor clone dynamics in lethal prostate cancer”). The study was carried out in collaboration with the Gerhardt Attard team at the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Cancer Hospital in London.
Alessandro Romanel, researcher in the laboratory of computational oncology at Cibio, directed by Demichelis, is co-first author of the study. The research group is now busy with the expansion of the effectiveness of the method so to strengthen doctors’ ability to identify a personalized treatment for patients with advanced cancer as quick as possible.
Francesca Demichelis:
Computational biologist from Bolzano, an international Phd in bioinformatics at the ICT doctoral school of the University of Trento and expert in the human genome and its alterations, as to the origin and progress of cancer. Francesca Demichelis works at the Centre for Integrative Biology (CIBIO) of the University of Trento where she is head of the Laboratory for computational oncology.
Before returning to Trento, Francesca Demichelis worked in the United States at the Harvard Medical School in Boston and at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York where she dealt with typecasting aggressive prostate tumours. She is also member of the American Society of Human Genetics, of the American Association for Cancer Research and of the Institute for precision medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College. She is author of about eighty scientific publications and her research activity is funded by the National Institute of Health, the United States Department of Defence, by the Prostate Cancer Foundation, the Fondazione Trentina per la Ricerca sui Tumori (Trentino foundation for cancer research) and the Associazione Italiana per la Ricerca sul Cancro (Italian association for cancer research).
Further details available in the press release in the attachment.