Mechanisms of resistance to intermittent androgen deprivation in patients with prostate cancer identified by a novel computational method

For progressive prostate cancer, intermittent androgen deprivation (IAD) is one of the most common and effective treatments. Although this treatment is usually initially effective at regressing tumors, most patients eventually develop castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC), for which there is no effective treatment and is generally fatal. Although several biologic mechanisms leading to CRPC development and their relative frequencies have been identified, it is difficult to determine which mechanisms of resistance are developing in a given patient. Personalized therapy that identifies and targets specific mechanisms of resistance developing in individual patients is likely one of the most promising methods of future cancer therapy. Prostate-specific antigen (PSA) is a biomarker for monitoring tumor progression. We incorporated a cell death rate (CDR) function into a previous dynamical PSA model that was highly accurate at fitting clinical PSA data for 7 patients. The mechanism of action of IAD is largely induction of apoptosis, and each mechanism of resistance varies in its CDR dynamics. Thus, we analyze the CDR levels and their time-dependent oscillations to identify mechanisms of resistance to IAD developing in individual patients.