BioCentury
ARTICLE | Distillery Therapeutics

Cancer

September 20, 2018 3:21 PM UTC

Patient sample and cell culture studies suggest inhibiting BDNF-TrkB signaling could help treat prostate cancer in African-American patients. In prostate fibroblasts isolated from four African-American patients, levels of BDNF were higher than in fibroblasts from European-American patients, and in two African-American prostate cancer cell lines, levels of TrkB were higher than in two European-American cell lines. In the two African-American cell lines, a TrkB inhibitor tool compound plus prostate fibroblasts from African-American patients decreased fibroblast-induced proliferation compared with the TrkB inhibitor plus prostate fibroblasts from European-American patients. Next steps could include testing other TrkB inhibitors in African-American patient-derived xenograft (PDX) mouse models of prostate cancer...