Michelle Story, PhD Candidate, Thesis Review Seminar, "The role of cancer stem cells in the pathogenesis of preneoplastic and neoplastic prostatic lesions in dogs and as a potential target for anti-cancer therapy"
Michelle’s advisors are A/Prof Chiara Palmieri, Dr Brett Stringer, Mr Rodney Straw.
Dogs are the only species other than humans that develop spontaneous prostate cancer at a significant incidence and, consequently, canine prostate cancer is often used as a model for human prostate cancer. Despite the importance of canine prostate cancer to comparative oncology and translational medicine, there is a significant lack of knowledge about the disease’s pathogenesis. This has hindered the development of early detection tests and effective treatments, which has then led to the disease having a very poor prognosis. Our study aims to improve our understanding of the pathogenesis of canine prostate cancer in the hope that this will enable the development of better diagnostic tests and treatments. Possible preneoplastic lesions have recently been identified in the canine prostate but are currently not well described, and the cell type of canine prostate cancer is still being investigated. In addition, whilst there is evidence to suggest that cancer stem cells are involved in human prostate cancer, few studies have investigated the role of cancer stem cells in canine prostate cancer. Therefore, our study investigates: (1) the presence of preneoplastic lesions in the canine prostate; (2) the cell type of preneoplastic and neoplastic lesions in the canine prostate; and (3) the role of cancer stem cells in canine prostate cancer through assessment of the expression of stem cell markers in canine prostatic tissue and canine prostate cell lines. As there are only a small number of canine prostate cancer cell lines reported in the scientific literature, we have established two cell lines of our own, which we have characterised and then used in our cell line experiments.
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