Prostate Cancer

The team also included researchers from the University of Western Ontario's Department of Physiology and Pharmacology.

Josef Penninger is currently the director of the IMBA in Vienna, where the project is being continued.Jones and her colleagues show that RANKL, a cytokine protein which is produced at high levels in bone marrow, acts on breast, prostate and skin cancer cells through the RANK receptor.

Over the past few years, Penninger's lab had determined that RANKL is essential in both bone breakdown and in controlling the growth of cells that form a lactating mammary gland.

Putting these two discoveries together, the team decided to study the link between breast cancer and bone metastases and the RANKL system.Jones and her colleagues studied bone metastases in a mouse model of skin melanoma, giving some animals a drug called osteoprotegerin (OPG), known to inhibit RANKL.

"The mice that were treated with OPG had fewer tumours in their bones than the mice that were not treated," says Jones, now an assistant professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology.

For example, control mice showed migration of cancer cells into long bones, vertebrae, ovaries, ad...

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