Localised prostate cancer, in particular, intermediate risk disease, has varied survival outcomes that cannot be predicted accurately using current clinical risk factors. External beam radiotherapy (EBRT) is one of the standard curative treatment options for localised disease and its efficacy is related to wide ranging aspects of tumour biology.
Histopathological techniques including immunohistochemistry and a variety of genomic assays have been used to identify biomarkers of tumour proliferation, cell cycle checkpoints, hypoxia, DNA repair, apoptosis, and androgen synthesis, which predict response to radiotherapy. Global measures of genomic instability also show exciting capacity to predict survival outcomes following EBRT. There is also an urgent clinical need for biomarkers to predict the radiotherapy fraction sensitivity of different prostate tumours and preclinical studies point to possible candidates. Finally, the increased resolution of next generation sequencing (NGS) is likely to enable yet more precise molecular predictions of radiotherapy response and fraction sensitivity.
BioMed research international. 2015 Oct 04 [Epub]
Anna Wilkins, David Dearnaley, Navita Somaiah
Division of Clinical Studies, The Institute of Cancer Research, London SM2 5NG, UK ; Division of Radiotherapy and Imaging, The Institute of Cancer Research, London SM2 5NG, UK. , Division of Radiotherapy and Imaging, The Institute of Cancer Research, London SM2 5NG, UK. , Division of Radiotherapy and Imaging, The Institute of Cancer Research, London SM2 5NG, UK ; Division of Cancer Biology, The Institute of Cancer Research, London SM2 5NG, UK.