ASCO24 Updates: Dr. Yu Wei Chen on Transcriptomic Signatures in Prostate Cancer

The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting is one of the largest and most prestigious conferences in the field of oncology. This year, the meeting took place from May 31 to June 4 in Chicago, Illinois. The event gathers oncologists, researchers, and healthcare professionals from around the world to discuss the latest advancements in cancer research, treatment, and patient care. Keynote sessions, research presentations, and panel discussions are typically part of the agenda, providing attendees with valuable insights into emerging trends and innovations in oncology.

This year, OncoDaily was at ASCO 2024 for the first time covering the meeting on-site. We had the pleasure of interviewing researchers who summarized the highlights of their work.

In this video, Dr. Yu Wei Chen, a medical oncologist at UC San Diego, shared insights on  ‘Clinical utility of transcriptomic signatures to identify androgen receptor and neuroendocrine signaling in prostate cancer.’

Hi, my name is Yu Wei Chen. I’m a medical oncologist, assistant clinical professor at the University of California, San Diego. It is my great pleasure to be here at the ASCO 2024 presenting our data.

Here I’m going to talk about our study using transcriptomic signatures in identifying androgen receptor signatures and also neuroendocrine prostate cancer signatures across the whole prostate histology. So, most of the prostate histology is the prostate adenocarcinoma. A small subset orchestration resistant prostate cancer will undergo small cell lineage transition to neuroendocrine prostate cancer.

The morphological characteristics between the prostate adenocarcinoma and the neuroendocrine prostate cancer are not fully defined and prostate adenocarcinoma can actually have mixed histology with the small cell prostate cancer. Previously, the androgen receptor signalling signature and the neuroendocrine prostate cancer signature have been identified. So, in this study, we collaborate with the CARES database.

We had approximately 4,500 prostate cancer tumor samples. We further categorized the tumor samples by the two gene signatures into four categories. The most common one in our study was the AR positive and neuroendocrine negative subtype represent roughly 36 percent.

And the second common type is the double negative represents roughly 30 percent. And the third one is the AR negative and neuroendocrine positive subgroup represent 20 percent. At least one is the double positive 40 percent of the samples represent this subgroup.

The most common histology in our study is the prostate adenocarcinoma. Two thirds of the prostate tumors are from the primary prostate tumors and one third of the samples are from the metastatic tumors including the lymph node, lung, liver, CNS, metastasis. So what we found is that there is distinct distributions of the four molecular subtypes depends on the tissue sites.

So for the AR positive and the neuroendocrine negative subgroup, it is more common among the primary prostate tumors, the lymph node metastasis and also the lung metastasis. For the neuroendocrine positive by the androgen receptor negative subgroups, this subgroup has higher representation among the bone and also the liver metastasis. For the double negative subgroup, it was found to have higher representation among the CNS metastasis.

So, as we learned from the result is that the prostate cancer is actually quite diverse even with the histology prostate adenocarcinoma. We are hoping in the future we can have more personalized approach in terms of treatment with the two gene signatures. In the end, I will highlight a clinical trial that is currently under development, led by Dr. Rena Marquet from UC San Diego and also Dr. Michelle Beltran from Dana-Farber.

The study is the PREDICT study, which is a biomarker-driven study and will utilize the two gene signatures to allocate treatment options in castration-resistant prostate cancer. Thank you.

More videos and content from ASCO 2024 on OncoDaily.