Pippa Cosper, MD, PhD

We are studying a new type of radiation therapy that acts like a GPS-guided missile because it is injected into the patient, goes straight to tumor cells that have the target, and delivers radiation to kill the cells. One drug called 177Lu-PSMA-617 is used to treat prostate cancer that has spread to other parts of the body. Unfortunately, this treatment only works in 45% of patients. Our goal is to understand why some patient’s tumors do not respond to this treatment so we can figure out ways to improve this. To do this, we first must learn more about how this drug works and how it kills cells. We will look at how prostate cancer cells grow and divide during treatment and find ways to increase cell death. We will do this in cells in a dish and in real tumors from patients. We will also make models that look like prostate cancers and grow cells in different patterns to look at how different mixtures of cells in a tumor affects treatment response.