Mo money means more prostate cancer research at Imperial

Head of prostate cancer research at Imperial, Professor Charlotte Bevan explains how Movember has helped give the disease the attention it deserves.

Professor Charlotte Bevan leads Imperial’s Androgen signalling and prostate cancer group, having joined the College in 1999.  Her team also work with colleagues at the Institute of Cancer Research and UCL as part of the London Movember Centre of Excellence.

Professor Bevan has recently been recognised as 'an outstanding mid-career women in endocrine cancer research' by the Society for Endocrinology. Her special editorial, A gender agenda, was published in the journal Endocrine-related Cancer.

To coincide with the annual month of men's health awareness and fundraising, she explains why prostate cancer poses such a great challenge, the impact of charitable facial hair, and how collaborations reap the greatest rewards.

What are your research priorities right now?

Prostate cancer can be long, drawn-out disease.  While this gives us opportunity to detect and treat it, at the same time it can allow the cancer to become resistant to therapies, and inevitably it does.

It is very good at ‘working out’ ways to evade treatments, using genetic changes to keep growing. We’re working to understand why prostate cancer drugs stop working, and using that knowledge to devise early warning systems for when resistance develops.

It is becoming increasingly common that patients run out of treatment options, so we’re also looking at new therapeutic strategies to combat advanced disease, which is the form that kills.

What’s needed to make advances in your field – where is a breakthrough going to come from?

The big thing that's going to happen is completely personalised medicine. No two men with prostate cancer will receive the same treatment, because they’ll have a regime tailored to their individual genetic and molecular profile.

As part of this, we need to work out methods of detecting changes in the cancer as soon as possible, so we can switch patients onto the most effective treatment. To make that work we're also going to need to continue to develop new therapy options, and it will involve finding the best combinations of treatments.

New drugs have come along, often for those patients that have become resistant to others. But increasingly these new treatments are also being brought forward for patients at earlier stages of disease, where appropriate.

How important are fundraising and awareness campaigns like Movember?

Since it began in 2004, the Movember campaign has increased awareness of prostate cancer enormously, to the point where it is now something that can be talked about in public. It’s no longer seen as an embarrassing disease of ageing.

And, of course, they have raised a critical mass of funding that's made big projects like the Movember Centres possible. These have allowed all the scientists involved to think bigger and better, and to work together in ways that were not feasible previously.

In London, this funds a five-year Centre of Excellence, which brings Imperial, the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) and UCL together. As part of this, they fully fund two members of my team – Dr Claire Fletcher and Aki Shibakawa – to look into biomarkers, called microRNAs, that signal treatment resistance.

This way of working brings together the best knowledge, expertise and specialities from the three institutions. ICR has established infrastructure and systems for clinical trials, and we receive a great deal of clinical information to match up with our samples.

Does your research into prostate cancer have implications outside of that disease?

When moved to Imperial, my closest collaborators were in breast cancer, which, just like the disease in the prostate, is a hormone-dependent cancer. Breast cancer is dependent on oestrogens and prostate, androgens. Oestrogen and androgen receptors have very similar structures, and so we use similar strategies to switch off production and action of these hormones in both sexes. 

A huge amount of the research in breast cancer, which has long been well funded, has been useful to prostate cancer research. But the tables are now turning a little, and advances in prostate cancer are also helping breast cancer research. Abiraterone – a drug originally developed to treat advanced prostate cancer – is now being trialled in patients with breast cancer.

What do you enjoy most about your work?

It's hard to say as there are so many things that make my job rewarding and interesting.  I love that every day is different – not only new challenges, but different activities. I may be giving a talk to students, working with colleagues, or interacting with patients. That may be here or it could be in another institute or different country.

We collaborate a lot with physical sciences in teaching and research, and I’m currently writing a grant with a chemist and a bioengineer. We all bring our own specialities and experience, which helps us see things from different and interesting perspectives. 

Aki Shibakawa, Professor Charlotte Bevan and Dr Claire Fletcher

I'm proud of my role in making prostate cancer a research priority at Imperial, where it was previously very understudied. I'm also hugely proud of my team and past members who have gone on to other institutions and roles.

Our group is very close-knit and the people I work with day-to-day make our work a lot of fun to be part of. Above all it’s the belief that what I'm doing is going to improve things for patients – perhaps not now, maybe not soon; but eventually.

Professor Bevan and her colleagues from the London Movember Centre of Excellence are raising money for the Movember Foundation. You can sponsor them on their funraising page.