Apologies if this has already been posted (but didn't appear to have been)
in the archives.

B.C. Cancer Agency (Canada) website http://tinyurl.com/5tlv2

2004 News - 2004/06/16: US Army Department of Defence provides more than $1
million for prostate cancer research

BC Cancer Agency researchers will receive more than $1 million Canadian from
the US Department of Defense Prostate Cancer Research Program to test two
innovative ideas that may one day lead to potent therapies in the battle
against prostate cancer.

Researchers have been stymied in predicting which prostate cancer drugs will
have the best therapeutic efficacy because initial success in animal models
doesn't always translate into success in human trials. The first grant for
$500,000 awarded to Drs. YZ Wang and Peter W. Gout will be used to study a
xenograft model developed by Dr. Wang, which allows the growth of freshly
isolated human prostate cancer tissue in mice.

In 2001, Dr. Wang was the first in the world to successfully graft both
early-stage and advanced human prostate cancer specimens in mice, and has
since perfected the technique with a more than 95 percent success rate.
Before Dr. Wang's achievement, scientists had been able to grow patients'
prostate cancer tissue in mice, but only sporadically and only when the
malignancies were highly advanced.

This new xenograft model is exciting because it may be used a) as a
prognostic tool, to determine which cancers are likely to progress to an
advanced stage; b) to test the effectiveness of new drugs with confidence
that they may be useful in the clinic, and c) to select the best drugs for
individual patients.

"We're looking ahead to a new era of personalized cancer therapy," says Dr.
Wang. "Right now we don't really know if a patient's cancer is going to
respond better to drug A, B or C. But imagine being able to take a
particular patient's tumour tissue, transplant it to several mice, and then
test the effectiveness of different drugs on the patient's tumour.

"In the future, the hope is that we'll be able to tell which drug is going
to have the maximum benefit for a patient right away, rather than a patient
trying one drug after another."

Using the xenograft model, Dr. Wang's colleague, Dr. Peter W. Gout, will
test an existing anti-arthritis drug, sulfasalazine, which in preliminary
laboratory tests has proven itself as a powerful agent in blocking the
uptake of cystine (an amino acid) in cells, a process essential for the
growth of some cancers. In the late 1990's, Dr. Gout discovered that certain
cancer cells can be starved to death by preventing the uptake of this
particular amino acid.

"We found in a pilot study that sulfasalazine caused a 60 to 80 percent
reduction in the growth of transplanted prostate tumours in mice, with no
major side-effects," says Dr. Gout. "We will be testing the efficacy of
sulfasalazine as a single agent in treatment of early and late stage
tumours, and in combination with other conventional drugs.

"If sulfasalazine proves effective, we could test it almost immediately in
human clinical trials since it has been used for decades in the treatment of
inflammatory diseases."