The first Fican seminar: Epigenetic and transcriptomic drivers of treatment resistance in prostate cancer

The first seminar, organized by FICAN Mid (Sisä-Suomen syöpäkeskus in Finnish) will be held online in Teams.

FICAN research professor Matti Nykter from Tampere University, Faculty of Medicine and Health Technology, Tampere University will give a talk on the title Epigenetic and transcriptomic drivers of treatment resistance in prostate cancer.

Abstract: Prostate cancer is a major global health burden with highly heterogeneous paths for disease progression. Role of AR as a main genomic determinant of treatment resistance is well established. Yet, heterogeneous mechanisms that contribute to disease progressions and treatment resistance are not well understood, hindering clinical management of the disease. In my talk, I will focus on our recent work on epigenetic and transcriptomic mechanisms to address these challenges.

We have recently characterized alterations in prostate cancer epigenome over the disease progression and gained insight into the impact of various genomic aberrations at the level of gene regulatory mechanisms. These studies have identified possible targets for development of new therapeutic approaches, where instead of targeting the molecules directly, epigenetic drugs could be targeted on cancer associated regulatory elements acquired, for example through enhancer hijacking. By combining single cell sequencing at transcriptomic and epigenetic levels, we uncovered and characterized treatment resistant subpopulations of cancer cells from prostate cancer cells. With spatial transcriptomics and bulk sequencing data from tumor tissue samples we demonstrated that expression signature of these cells is present in untreated primary samples and is predictive of treatment outcome both in primary and late stage disease.

Taken together, we are starting to gain understanding on the emergence of treatment resistance and disease progression at the level of epigenetic and transcriptomic regulation, tumor tissue organization and microenvironment in the context of the evolutionary history of the tumors.

Please see more information on the Computational Biology group here.  

For further information on the seminar, please contact Maarit Sillanpää, email maarit.sillanpaa@uef.fi.