Prevention of Prostate Cancer by Inositol Hexaphosphate
Abstract
Prostate cancer is the most common invasive malignancy and second leading cause of cancer death in men in the United States and many other parts of the world. Up till now, hormone ablation therapy is the major way to treat prostate cancer. Such therapy only causes a temporary regression and tumor growth resumes within 6-18 months. It is now well established that aberrant expressions of mitogenic growth factors and their receptors are responsible for unregulated growth of the prostate cancer. Once autocrine growth factor loops are operative, prostate cancer progresses to an androgen independent state. It is uniformly fatal because no systemic therapy currently exists that inhibit growth of androgen-independent prostate cancer. Therefore better androgen blockade is not the answer for treating prostate cancer. Rather, research efforts should focus on the therapeutic agents that will inhibit growth factor signaling pathways thereby inhibit growth. While many new classes of cancer chemopreventive agents are being evaluated in clinical trials for other malignancies, little success has been achieved in terms of prostate cancer prevention. During the past several years, a large number of studies have pointed out that inositol hexaphosphate (IP6), the most abundant phosphorylated inositol present in beans, cereal grains, lentils and legumes, could have beneficial effect on variety of cancers. The underlying hypothesis driving our work is that unregulated expression of mitogenic growth factors are responsible for carcinogenesis of the prostate gland and IP6 can prevent such development by inhibiting growth factor-induced signal transduction. Therefore, IP6 could be a potential agent for the prevention and treatment of prostate cancer.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Feb 01, 2006
- Accession Number
- ADA454047
Entities
People
- Partha P. Banerjee
Organizations
- Georgetown University