Boston, MA – The most common site of prostate cancer metastasis is in bone. Researchers in the Dimitroff Laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) have found that fucosylations, structures on the surface of prostate cancer cells, trigger prostate cancer cell adhesion inside a blood vessel wall in bone tissue, greatly increasing the prospect of prostate cancer cells metastasizing to bone. These findings appear online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. 

Fucosylations are created by the action of alpha1,3 fucosyltransferases, which are proteins found at high levels in native prostate cancer cells that have metastasized to bone. Alpha 1,3 fucosyltransferases have been studied for more than a decade in other disease settings, such as inflammation and they are more commonly known for making fucosylations on white blood cells that help white blood cells stop in blood vessels and migrate into inflamed tissues. Understanding the previously well-characterized mechanism of these proteins allows researchers to consider these mechanisms, a process now referred to as "Hematopoietic Mimicry", as a means to identify factors in prostate cancer metastasis. This mechanism may also be applied to understanding metastasis of cancers of the breast, colon, pancreas and lung.

What are the next steps in this research and what may be the long-term clinical implications?

Now that the Dimitroff laboratory has elucidated a molecular mechanism for prostate cancer cell adhesion inside blood vessels, their subsequent studies will focus on how these bound prostate cancer cells exit a blood vessel and enter bone tissue.  Better understanding of this process will provide a new perspective on how cancer cells metastasize as well as provide new targets for cancer therapy development.

The study was funded by investigator-initiated grants from the American Cancer Society and the National Institutes of Health.

Contact: Holly Brown-Ayers, Media Relations Coordinator, (617) 534-1603, hbrown-ayers@partners.org

Source: Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH)