Publications by authors named "Paul G Corn"

Hormone therapy (HT) to treat prostate cancer is reported to cause adverse changes in body composition. Clinically, interpatient body composition changes are heterogeneous, but the biological and clinical determinants of body composition toxicity are unknown. Herein, we test the hypothesis that inherited polymorphisms in steroidogenic genes are associated with differential changes in body composition after HT.

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Background: Staging patients with high-risk prostate cancer (HRPCa) with conventional imaging of computed tomography (CT) and bone scintigraphy (BS) is suboptimal. Therefore, we aimed to compare the accuracy of whole-body magnetic resonance imaging (WBMRI) with conventional imaging to stage patients with HRPCa.

Methods: We prospectively enrolled patients with newly diagnosed HRPCa (prostate-specific antigen ≥20 ng/ml and/or Grade Group ≥4).

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Immune checkpoint therapy has limited efficacy for patients with bone-metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (bmCRPC). To improve immunotherapy for bmCRPC, we aimed to identify the mechanism of bmCRPC-induced changes in the immune microenvironment. Among bmCRPC patients, higher levels of a 32-gene M2-like macrophage signature in bone metastasis samples correlated with shorter overall survival.

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  • * Research on mice showed that Ra-223 rapidly reduces the number of osteoblasts (bone-forming cells) and this reduction can persist for at least 18 weeks, particularly affecting the trabecular bone regions.
  • * The study highlights that while Ra-223 is effective against tumor-induced bone effects, it also negatively impacts normal bone health, suggesting that strategies to enhance bone health could help mitigate the associated fracture risks for patients.
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Background: Androgen signaling is central to prostate cancer and men's health. Prior data indicates that increasing body fat is unfavorable in the localized setting yet associated with favorable outcomes in men with metastatic disease. Understanding the biological links between adiposity and prostate cancer may optimize the therapeutic index with ASI.

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Purpose: To determine the efficacy and safety of risk-adapted combinations of androgen signaling inhibitors and inform disease classifiers for metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancers.

Patients And Methods: In a modular, randomized phase II trial, 192 men were treated with 8 weeks of abiraterone acetate, prednisone, and apalutamide (AAPA; module 1) and then allocated to modules 2 or 3 based on satisfactory (≥50% PSA decline from baseline and <5 circulating tumor cell/7.5 mL) versus unsatisfactory status.

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Purpose: Develop and deploy a robust discovery platform that encompasses heterogeneity, clinical annotation, and molecular characterization and overcomes the limited availability of prostate cancer models. This initiative builds on the rich MD Anderson (MDA) prostate cancer (PCa) patient-derived xenograft (PDX) resource to complement existing publicly available databases by addressing gaps in clinically annotated models reflecting the heterogeneity of potentially lethal and lethal prostate cancer.

Experimental Design: We performed whole-genome, targeted, and RNA sequencing in representative samples of the same tumor from 44 PDXs derived from 38 patients linked to donor tumor metadata and corresponding organoids.

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Combined androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) and radiotherapy (RT) improves outcomes for intermediate and high-risk prostate cancer. Treatment intensification with abiraterone acetate/prednisone (AAP) provides additional benefit for high-risk disease. We previously reported 3-year outcomes of a single-arm prospective multicenter trial (AbiRT trial) of 33 patients with unfavorable intermediate risk (UIR) and favorable high risk (FHR) prostate cancer undergoing short course, combination therapy with ADT, AAP, and RT.

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Unlabelled: Immune checkpoint therapy has limited efficacy for patients with bone metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer (bmCRPC). In this study, we revealed a novel mechanism that may account for the relative resistance of bmCRPC to immune checkpoint therapy. We found that prostate cancer (PCa)-induced bone via endothelial-to-osteoblast (EC-to-OSB) transition causes an ingress of M2-like macrophages, leading to an immunosuppressive bone tumor microenvironment (bone-TME).

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Unlabelled: Disease progression following androgen ablation was shown to be associated with upregulation of the glucocorticoid receptor (GR). Longitudinal monitoring of GR expression in circulating extracellular vesicles (EV) may reflect changes in the tumor cell and facilitates detection of acquired resistance. We utilized LNCaP, LREX cells and a patient-derived xenograft, MDA PDX 322-2-6a, for in vitro and in vivo experiments.

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Article Synopsis
  • Neoadjuvant chemotherapy (neoCTX) is shown to be the best treatment for surgically resectable neuroendocrine carcinoma of the urinary tract (NEC-URO), improving outcomes compared to immediate surgery.
  • A study involving 203 patients revealed that neoCTX significantly increased the downstaging rate of tumors, particularly with the combination of ifosfamide and etoposide (IA/EP).
  • Overall survival rates after five years were much higher for patients receiving neoCTX (57%) compared to those undergoing surgery alone (22%) or surgery followed by adjuvant chemotherapy (30%).
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Purpose: Speckle-type POZ protein (SPOP) is important in DNA damage response (DDR) and maintenance of genomic stability. Somatic heterozygous missense mutations in the SPOP substrate-binding cleft are found in up to 15% of prostate cancers. While mutations in SPOP predict for benefit from androgen receptor signaling inhibition (ARSi) therapy, outcomes for patients with SPOP-mutant (SPOPmut) prostate cancer are heterogeneous and targeted treatments for SPOPmut castrate-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) are lacking.

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Importance: Despite evidence demonstrating an overall survival benefit with up-front hormone therapy in addition to established synergy between hormone therapy and radiation, the addition of metastasis-directed therapy (MDT) to hormone therapy for oligometastatic prostate cancer, to date, has not been evaluated in a randomized clinical trial.

Objective: To determine in men with oligometastatic prostate cancer whether the addition of MDT to intermittent hormone therapy improves oncologic outcomes and preserves time with eugonadal testosterone compared with intermittent hormone therapy alone.

Design, Setting, Participants: The External Beam Radiation to Eliminate Nominal Metastatic Disease (EXTEND) trial is a phase 2, basket randomized clinical trial for multiple solid tumors testing the addition of MDT to standard-of-care systemic therapy.

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  • The prostate tumor microenvironment (TME) is characterized by a lack of active immune cells and is largely immunosuppressive, making it challenging for treatments like immune checkpoint therapies to be effective.
  • A study tested the safety and immune-modulating effects of daratumumab and edicotinib on patients with localized prostate cancer prior to surgical removal of the tumor, assessing adverse events and rates of complete remission.
  • Results showed that while daratumumab had some adverse effects and reduced certain immune cell populations, neither treatment caused significant changes in tumor markers or complete remission rates, highlighting the complexity of the TME in prostate cancer.
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  • Metastatic prostate cancer leads to the formation of bone lesions that complicate treatment, with these lesions arising from endothelial cells transitioning to osteoblasts due to tumor factors like BMP4.
  • The study reveals that activating retinoic acid receptors (RAR) can prevent this transition, thus inhibiting abnormal bone formation and tumor growth in several models of osteogenic prostate cancer through the use of compounds like palovarotene and all-trans-retinoic acid (ATRA).
  • Mechanistically, RAR activation induces degradation of pSmad1, a key player in the transition process, by facilitating its interaction with a ubiquitin ligase, offering a potential pathway for improving treatments for prostate cancer patients with bone metastasis.
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Purpose: The benefit of local consolidative therapy (LCT) for oligometastasis across histologies remains uncertain. EXTernal beam radiation to Eliminate Nominal metastatic Disease (EXTEND; NCT03599765) is a randomized phase 2 basket trial evaluating the effectiveness of LCT for oligometastatic solid tumors. We report here the prospective results of the single-arm "lead-in" phase intended to identify histologies most likely to accrue to histology-specific endpoints in the randomized phase.

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Objectives: Multimodal kidney-preserving (MKP) strategies may be an option for patients with localised or locally advanced high-risk upper tract urothelial carcinoma (UTUC) who have a relative contraindication for nephroureterectomy (NU).

Materials And Methods: We studied patients with UTUC who were managed with MKP strategies, consisting of systemic anticancer therapy, with or without local/topical strategies after endoscopic control of intraluminal tumours. Primary end points were overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS).

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  • The study investigates how immune-suppressive myeloid cells influence the effectiveness of anti-PD-1 therapy in advanced clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) and explores the impact of the tyrosine kinase inhibitor sitravatinib on this process.
  • A phase 1-2 clinical trial involving 42 patients showed that combining sitravatinib with nivolumab resulted in a 35.7% objective response rate and an 11.7-month median progression-free survival, with significant survival rates after nearly 19 months.
  • The results indicated that certain blood markers (neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio) can predict treatment response, and sitravatinib effectively reduced immune-suppressive
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Importance: Previous studies have shown a consistent association between hormone therapy (HT), such as androgen deprivation therapy, to treat prostate cancer and depression risk. However, the association between second-generation antiandrogens (AAs) and depression is unknown.

Objective: To test the a priori hypothesis that second-generation AAs are associated with an increased risk of depression, including compared with traditional forms of HT.

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Background: No curative therapy is currently available for metastatic prostate cancer (PCa). The diverse mechanisms of progression include fibroblast growth factor (FGF) axis activation.

Objective: To investigate the molecular and clinical implications of fibroblast growth factor receptor 1 (FGFR1) and its isoforms (α/β) in the pathogenesis of PCa bone metastases.

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  • Immune checkpoint therapy (ICT) is less effective in treating metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) due to limited T cell presence in the tumor environment; combining anti-CTLA-4 and anti-PD-1 might improve patient responses in this context.
  • * A study was conducted on chemotherapy-naïve mCRPC patients with bone involvement, administering tremelimumab and durvalumab to evaluate safety and efficacy regarding adverse events and PSA levels.
  • * Among 26 patients treated, 42% experienced significant adverse events, while some showed declines in PSA levels and stable disease for over six months, indicating potential benefits of the combined therapy.
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Background: Immune checkpoint therapy (ICT) prolongs survival in subsets of patients with cancer but can also trigger immune-related adverse events (irAEs) requiring treatment discontinuation. Recent studies have investigated safety of ICT rechallenge after irAEs, and evidence suggests that rechallenge may be associated with improved antitumor responses. However, data are limited on response duration after ICT rechallenge, particularly after severe irAEs.

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Purpose: Despite significant benefit for other cancer subtypes, immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) therapy has not yet been shown to significantly improve outcomes for men with castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC). Prior data have shown that DNA damage response (DDR) deficiency, via genetic alteration and/or pharmacologic induction using DDR inhibitors (DDRi), may improve ICB response in solid tumors in part due to induction of mitotic catastrophe and innate immune activation. Discerning the underlying mechanisms of this DDRi-ICB interaction in a prostate cancer-specific manner is vital to guide novel clinical trials and provide durable clinical responses for men with CRPC.

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We analyzed the efficacy and mechanistic interactions of PARP inhibition (PARPi; olaparib) and CDK4/6 inhibition (CDK4/6i; palbociclib or abemaciclib) combination therapy in castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) and neuroendocrine prostate cancer (NEPC) models. We demonstrated that combined olaparib and palbociblib or abemaciclib treatment resulted in synergistic suppression of the p-Rb1-E2F1 signaling axis at the transcriptional and posttranslational levels, leading to disruption of cell-cycle progression and inhibition of E2F1 gene targets, including genes involved in DDR signaling/damage repair, antiapoptotic family members ( and ), , and neuroendocrine differentiation (NED) markers and In addition, olaparib + palbociclib or olaparib + abemaciclib combination treatment resulted in significantly greater growth inhibition and apoptosis than either single agent alone. We further showed that PARPi and CDK4/6i combination treatment-induced CDK1 inhibition suppressed p-S70-BCL-2 and increased caspase cleavage, while CDK1 overexpression effectively prevented the downregulation of p-S70-BCL-2 and largely rescued the combination treatment-induced cytotoxicity.

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