Unraveling the Mystery of Prostate Cancer Metastasis
Carrie Rinker-Schaeffer, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Urology and Director of Urologic Research, has been working in the area of prostate cancer metastasis for a number of years. Funded by NIH, and the Department of Defense as well as a variety of industrial sources, she has now firmly established that a specific gene on human chromosome 17, Map Kinase Kinase 4 (MKK4) regulates and inhibits the ability of prostate cancer cells to grow at metastatic sites such as the lung. Furthermore, she has shown that MKK4 is an important regulator of metastasis in other tumors such as ovarian cancer. Her team is currently working hard to understand the metabolic pathway that MKK4 controls so that it will be possible to target this pathway therapeutically. If, for example, it were possible to restore MKK4 function in prostate cancers in which this gene has been rendered inactive, it would potentially allow us to prevent the metastatic growth of prostate cancer at secondary sites. This would represent a major advance in the treatment of prostate cancer.
Dr. Rinker-Schaeffer’s laboratory conducts both clinical and basic research. She is an active collaborator with a number of colleagues throughout the University and is also training urology residents as well as doctoral students and undergraduates in a variety of research projects. Recently Dr. Erich Jaeger became the first student in her laboratory to obtain his Ph.D. Erich identified a region of human chromosome 12 that also regulates prostate cancer metastasis in our animal models. He established that a specific binding protein known as HP1 is a prostate cancer metastasis suppressor gene, and this work will be published in the International Journal of Oncology. In normal cells HP1 controls the structure of DNA, and changes in DNA structure can result in further alterations in gene expression. The finding that HP1 may regulate metastasis by altering DNA structure opens up an entirely new avenue of research for the laboratory. He is continuing to work in urologic cancer as he pursues his post doctoral fellowship at the University of California San Francisco.
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