Prostate cancer researcher wins award

An Italian researcher has won a prestigious award for her research into advanced prostate cancer.

Dr Maria Prencipe won the St Luke's Young Investigators Award for her work on a protein which may cause prostate cancer to spread beyond the organ.

She scooped the top prize for her research at University College Dublin that investigated building a pipeline for novel therapies in castrate-resistant prostate cancer.

She will receive an education grant and the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland Bronze Medal.

This year, all four finalists are Irish Cancer Society research fellows, who are receiving combined research grants worth more than €850,000 from the society to advance research in their respective cancer fields.

The other three finalists were Dr Antoinette Perry who is also studying potential treatments for prostate cancer, Dr Britta Stordal who is investigating treatments for ovarian cancer and Dr Anne-Marie Byrne whose research field is oesophageal cancer.

Some 3,000 men are diagnosed with prostate cancer every year in Ireland. For many of them, the cancer is localised and can be treated, but for others it metastasises into other parts of the body. There are few treatments for metastasised prostate cancer.

Targeted therapies

Dr Prencipe is working on targeted therapies, in particular molecular targets for advanced prostate cancer.

She has been studying prostate cancer cell lines and found one protein, Serum Response Factor (SRF), is much more abundant in patients with advanced prostate cancer.

She is working on a treatment that will target this protein.

The St Luke’s Young Investigators Award, established in 2004, recognises young researchers in the field of clinical, basic or translational oncology research.