Dr. Tanya Stoyanova awarded $1.5 million to uncover new ways to treat advanced prostate cancer

Dr. Tanya Stoyanova, associate professor of molecular and medical pharmacology and urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, was awarded a $1.5 million grant from the National Cancer Institute to identify new treatment strategies for neuroendocrine prostate cancer, a highly aggressive form of the disease.

Currently, the first line of treatment for many men with advanced metastatic prostate cancer is hormone therapy. Although the treatment can work for some, the cancer often comes back in a more aggressive form and becomes resistant to hormone therapy. Neuroendocrine prostate cancer is a highly aggressive subtype of prostate cancer that increases in incidence after development of hormone therapy resistance.

The grant will help support Stoyanova and her team identify new molecular mechanisms underlying the development of neuroendocrine prostate cancer, investigate what role a detoxification enzyme may play in contributing to the disease, and test new agents — on their own and in combination — to see if they can be effective treatments for the hard-to-treat cancer.

“With this study, we hope to set the foundation for clinical trials with new therapeutic interventions and combinations of therapeutic agents to combat metastatic neuroendocrine prostate cancer,” said Stoyanova, a member of the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA.