Noel Castan Fellowship
Background
The Noel Castan Fellowship was established by Anita Castan, in memory of her husband, who passed away from cancer two decades ago.
“I understand the value of supporting clinical trials and take this opportunity to congratulate ANZUP on its many successes to date and its collaborative approach.”
ANZUP was delighted to launch the Noel Castan Fellowship at the 2019 Annual Scientific Meeting (ASM) in Brisbane.
The aim of the Noel Castan Fellowship is to build ANZUP’s research capacity and increase the translation of information collected from our trials, which will contribute to better understanding of how to optimise patient care.
Recipients
The Noel Castan Fellowship was awarded to ANZUP members: Hui-Ming Lin (2020) and Kath Schubach (2022).
Project Title:
‘Bioinformatics’ project is an analysis of the lipidomic and cytokine profiles from ANZUP’s ENZAMET study, which may identify novel biomarkers from the enzalutamide response, and provide new therapeutic targets to overcome enzalutamide resistance to improve the outcome of prostate cancer patients.
Outcomes from the Noel Castan Fellowship:
The Noel Castan Fellowship has enabled me to perform research on biological markers in blood specimens from the ENZAMET trial. The ENZAMET trial, which was led by ANZUP, is an international Phase 3 trial on 1125 men with metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer (mHSPC). The trial showed that addition of enzalutamide to standard testosterone suppression improved survival and delayed clinical progression. However, not all men responded to enzalutamide, and responders eventually stop responding.
The aim of my project under the Noel Castan Fellowship was to look for biological markers in blood that can predict who will respond to enzalutamide, as this may help decide the best course of treatment and lead to new treatments for improving response. The biological markers I studied were lipids (fat molecules) and cytokines (chemical messengers for immune cells).
When I started the project, the retrieval of ENZAMET blood samples from multiple international trial sites was delayed by the COVID pandemic. Thus in the meantime, I prepared the analytical pipeline and statistical algorithms for the project by performing a similiar study on a smaller cohort of Australian men with castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC). The results were published in “Lin et al (2021) Cancers (Basel) 13:4964. Relationship between circulating lipids and cytokines in metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer”.
Finally in mid 2023, we started processing the ENZAMET blood samples for my project. By January 2024, the profiling of 823 lipids and 15 cytokines were completed. With the lipid data, I showed that a lipid biomarker (PCPro) which we had previously developed for metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC), was also prognostic in mHSPC. These findings are extremely exciting because we are also investigating if PCPro can be used as an indicator for personalised metabolic therapy in metastatic prostate cancer. The findings were presented as a poster at the European Society for Medical Oncology in 2024 – “Horvath et al, Association of the lipid biomarker, PCPro, and clinical outcomes in the ENZAMET trial (ANZUP 1304)”. A manuscript is currently under review by a journal with myself as the first author. I have also derived new prognostic lipid signatures for mHSPC (unpublished yet). Analysis of the cytokine data is still ongoing, and the results are looking interesting.
The fellowship ended in June 2024 which, later than originally planned due to COVID delays. Nevertheless, the project is still ongoing through other fundings as the data analysis is not completed. I am extremely grateful for the fellowship as it enabled me to work on this exciting research project with results which may improve clinical outcomes in metastatic prostate cancer.
Kath Schubach’s ‘Quality of Life’ project will develop new questions in trials, using existing data innovatively enhancing and facilitating collaboration and thereby drawing attention and meaning to ‘the patient experience’ and aligning with the mission of ANZUP’s clinical research to improve outcomes.