CCBIO webinar: Ian Mills

Ian Mills
Centre for Cancer Research and Cell Biology, Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland, and Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, University of Oxford, UK

Prostate cancer is a high incidence male cancer and a significant cause of cancer-specific mortality. In the course of the last two decades genomics has identified a complex landscape of mutational changes associated with prostate cancers within individual patients and across patient cohorts. This multi-focal heterogeneity has made it difficult to identify oncogenic driver mutations in early-stage disease, although there is evidence for clonal selection as prostate cancer progresses to metastasis. By contrast there is significant evidence of high-incidence transcriptional, epigenetic and metabolic changes in early-stage prostate cancer. The phrase ‘non-oncogene addiction’ refers to a dependency on biological processes supported by genes and proteins that are not individually able to fully transform cells but are able to create a cancer permissive state. Given that mutational selection occurs in the progression to advanced/metastatic prostate cancer, we hypothesize that non-oncogene addiction may be particularly significant in the earlier stages of prostate cancer development and in localized disease. In this seminar I will provide some examples of these processes and refer in particular to transcriptional processivity, the unfolded protein response and nucleolar function. I will discuss the challenges and opportunities in assessing their activity and in perturbing them to impact on prostate cancer progression.

Chairperson: Karl-Henning Kalland, CCBIO