Insights Into Prostate Cancer’s New Subtypes Lead To Tailored Treatment

(CTN News) – Researchers say artificial intelligence can revolutionize how prostate cancer is diagnosed and treated in the future by revealing a new form of aggressive prostate cancer. Prostate cancer has two different subtypes, called evotypes, according to a study published in Cell Genomics.

According to researchers at the University of Oxford and the University of Manchester, UK, the findings could help tailor treatments to each patient’s genetic profile and be delivered through artificial intelligence.

According to lead researcher Dan Woodcock of the University of Oxford, prostate tumours evolve along multiple pathways.

In addition to allowing us to classify tumours based on how they evolve, Woodcock said, this understanding is critical for predicting the outcome of the cancer.

A consortium of researchers, organized by scientists from the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) and the University of East Anglia, UK, called the Pan Prostate Cancer Group, analyzed genetic data collected from thousands of prostate cancer samples taken across nine countries as part of a collaborative project.

Together with Cancer Research UK (CRUK), they are developing a genetic test that, when combined with conventional staging and grading, could provide a more precise prognosis for each patient.
With the help of artificial intelligence, researchers studied changes in DNA from 159 prostate cancer samples.

A neural network technique was used to identify two distinct cancer groups among these patients. By applying two more mathematical approaches to the data, these two groups were confirmed. The results were confirmed in other independent datasets from Australia and Canada.

They subsequently combined all the information to create an evolutionary tree showing how the two subtypes of prostate cancer develop, eventually resulting in two distinct disease types called ‘evotypes’.

According to Professor David Wedge of Manchester Cancer Research Centre, who led the study, this realisation is what makes it possible for us to differentiate the disease types. It has not been done before since HER2+ in breast cancer is more complicated than in prostate cancer.

“This understanding allows us to classify tumors based on their evolutionary trajectory rather than based solely on gene mutations or expression patterns,” Wedge said.

A professor from UEA’s Norwich Medical School emphasized that prostate cancer is a disease men tend to die from rather than from, even though it accounts for a large proportion of all male cancer deaths.

 Therefore, men can avoid unnecessary treatments and avoid side effects like incontinence and impotence.

This study is crucial because we thought prostate cancer was just one type of disease until now. However, advances in artificial intelligence have enabled us to show that there are in fact two types,” he said.

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