Dietary Determinants of Prostate Cancer

Prostate Cancer (PCa) accounts for nearly 30% of all newly diagnosed cancers among American men. Epidemiologic studies suggest that dietary factors may be important in the etiology of this disease. The objective of our research is to determine how nutritional compounds genistein, betasitosterol (SIT), and omega-6 fatty acids (FA) function as modulators of PCa. In the third and final year of this fellowship, the fellow joined the National Cancer Institute's Cancer Prevention Fellowship Program and has continued working on the DOD-PCRP Postdoctoral Fellowship project and 30% effort (with knowledge and approval from the DOd-PCRP). During this year, we finished printing our custom microarray as well as optimized the hybridization protocol. We are currently performing expression analysis using the microarrays for both the in vitro and in vivo experiments using well established cell lines. Finally, we have initiated xenograft in vivo experiments with a novel PCa model that was developed recently in a collaborating laboratory.