Weill Cornell Medicine received a $1.5 million grant from the U.S.
Department of Defense Prostate Cancer Research Program to develop new approaches for predicting the spread of cancer cells to the bone in men with prostate cancer, using tumor samples taken at early stages of the disease. The American Cancer Society projects about 35,250 deaths from prostate cancer in the United States in 2024. Metastases, especially to the bone, is the leading cause of death in men who have prostate cancer.
It's also associated with very high risk of skeletal fractures, severe pain and poor quality of life." Dr. Mohamed Omar, principal investigator, assistant professor of research in pathology and laboratory medicine, division of computational and systems pathology, and member of the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine Predicting which patients will develop bone metastases from their initial diagnosis of prostate cancer would be valuable in personalizing treatment plans-;more aggressive therapy for higher risk patients and those who are at low risk of metastases could avoid unnecessary treatment.
Dr. Omar and his research team will work with multiple mouse models of prostate cancer to assess the molecular profiles and spatial arrangement of cells in the tumor and bone microenvironments. They will also study the size, shape and structure of these cells to determine how the cells interact with each other in the tumor microenvironment and with the surrounding healthy .