Beyond the Horizon: Rethinking Prostate Cancer Treatment Through Innovation and Alternative Strategies

For nearly a century, fundamental observations that prostate cancer (PCa) cells nearly always require AR stimulation for sustained proliferation have led to a unidirectional quest to abrogate such a pathway. Similarly focused have been efforts to understand AR-driven processes in the context of elevated expression of its target genes, and much less so on products that become overexpressed when AR signaling is suppressed. Treatment with ARSI results in an increased expression of the TLK1B splice variant via a 'translational' derepression driven by the compensatory mTOR activation and consequent activation of the TLK1 > NEK1 > ATR > Chk1 and NEK1 > YAP axes. In due course, this results first in a pro-survival quiescence and then adaptation to ADT and CRPC progression. This constitutes a novel liability for PCa that we have targeted for several years and novel approaches.