Endocrine Abstracts

Understanding the mechanisms that underly prostate cancer initiation and progression requires a comprehensive annotation of the cancer genome. While most research has focused on protein coding genes, there is increasing basic and clinical evidence that the much larger non-coding genome plays a critical role in prostate cancer tumourigenesis. The non-coding genome harbours numerous functional elements that regulate the expression of all protein-coding genes, including oncogenes...

Androgen receptor (AR) signaling is critical at all stages of prostate cancer including chemically castrated late-stage forms of the disease. How the AR can initiate transcription in the absence of androgens has been proposed to occur through several mechanisms including the production of constitutively active androgen receptor variants. Lacking a ligand binding domain, these variants are intrinsically resistant to all clinically approved AR antagonists and have been found to ...