Prostate cancer is the most frequently diagnosed cancer among men. One out of six men in Canada will be diagnosed with prostate cancer (PCa) during his lifetime. Furthermore, PCa is now detected at earlier stages due to heightened awareness and improved screening techniques. As a result, we focus our research on localized PCa, considering that 35% of them will relapse after prostatectomy and that current prognostic tools that include clinico-pathological parameters lack sufficient accuracy to effectively predict recurrence.

We will study sex-steroid hormones that play a crucial role in the development and progression of PCa whereas nothing is known about their role in predicting disease reccurrence after prostatectomy.

Our preliminary data identified novel markers in steroid-regulating pathways that define subgroups of patients likely to experience or no cancer relapse. Here, we propose to further characterize this set of markers looking at hormonal exposure in blood and prostate tissues of PCa patients and investigate tumor characteristics. Findings have the potential to provide more accurate stratification of patients into risk groups for treatment decisions and future adjuvant clinical trials and the development of therapeutic agents or combinations of agents that target adverse effects of high risk profiles or mimic favorable profiles conferring reduced risk of recurrence.