( lood he said. Rajasekaran said PSM...)UCLA cancer researchers shake loose hidden biomarker

Rajasekaran said PSMA is an important biomarker for prostate cancer and its expression in the cell is proportional to the severity of the cancer ?the more advanced the disease, the more PSMA is expressed.

Rajasekaran and his team also showed for the first time in this study that prostate cancer cells maintain a well-differentiated morphology, with the PSMA hidden in the apical membrane of the cell, even when the cancer spreads outside the prostate ?a fact that hadn't been proven before. Many researchers, in fact, had believed the opposite was true, Rajasekaran said. So discovering the mechanism of moving the PSMA to a more treatment accessible location on the cell could have ramifications for treating the sickest patients, those in whom the cancer has spread.

"The ability to reverse the polarity of PSMA from apical to the basolateral could have significant implications for the PSMA as a therapeutic target," the study states.

Pairing treatments may be even more important for patients with advanced cancers, for whom few options are available, Rajasekaran said. "Chemotherapy alone doesn't do everything and immunotherapy alone might not do everything, but if could use both, we might have more success in treating patients, especially those whose cancer has spread," he said.

Rajasekaran and his team performed their research in prostate cancer cells lines and plan to validate their findings first in animal models and then in human clinical trials, which could be available in three to four years.

Prostate cancer is expected to strike 232,090 men this year alone, according to the American Cancer Society. Of those, 30,350 are expected to die. Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in men.