In a study to be published in the April, 2006 issue of the British Journal of Urology International, researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center have shown that Raloxifene, a drug commonly used to treat osteoporosis, has a potential clinical benefit in treating men with prostate cancer.
This study has implications for the approximately 35,000 men who will die this year of advanced prostate cancer.
Prostate cancer is the leading cause of cancer and the second leading cause of cancer-related death among men living in the United States. Approximately one in six men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during his lifetime. "We undertook this study because we desperately need new therapies for patients with advanced prostate cancer," said David B. Agus, M.D., research director of the Louis Warschaw Prostate Cancer Center at Cedars-Sinai and principal investigator of the study.
Since Raloxifene is a drug already on the market, researchers were able to move directly into a Phase II clinical trial. They identified the presence of the beta isoform of the estrogen receptor in prostate cancer tissue samples, then moved directly into studies of animals with human prostate cancer, and then onto human clinical trials. The entire process took only 2-3 years.