Alexandra Polasko
Stanford University, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
As men age, the prostate often enlarges, squeezing the urethra and making urination difficult. This condition, benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), affects a large share of older men and costs more than $4 billion a year in the United States.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Physiology
Pharmacology
- Topics
benign prostatic hyperplasia
prostate
bone morphogenetic protein
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2031
What they work on
- Determine whether inhibiting BMP5, a secreted growth-signaling protein, slows growth and survival of patient-derived xenografts of benign prostatic hyperplasia, and whether adding BMP5 accelerates them.
- Elucidate how BMP5 drives prostate epithelial proliferation and survival by using spatial RNA sequencing of BPH xenografts to see which cells respond and which pathways they activate.
- Build a three-dimensional spheroid culture of prostate cells to test which additional growth factors, alone or combined with BMP5, modulate BPH growth and survival as candidate therapeutic targets.
- Validate BMP5-related molecular changes found in preclinical models against human tissue microarrays from BPH patients to confirm clinical relevance of the proposed targets.
More about the research
Current drugs act broadly rather than on the specific signals that drive the overgrowth, and they do not work for everyone. This project asks which growth signals make prostate cells multiply and survive, and whether blocking one of them can shrink or slow the overgrowth.
Why it matters
Benign prostatic hyperplasia causes urinary symptoms in a large fraction of aging men, and existing treatments are nonspecific. Showing that BMP5 signaling drives prostate overgrowth, and that blocking it curbs that growth in patient-derived models, could justify clinical testing of selective BMP5 inhibitors and point to new markers for identifying which men would benefit.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Douglas Strand
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research
Map the growth and tissue-shaping signals made by interstitial fibroblasts, supportive cells around the prostate's urethra, using spatial transcriptomics on human prostate tissue from development and from BPH.
Suryavathi Viswanadhapalli
University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine how LIF/LIFR signaling, a growth-factor pathway linked to poor survival, drives endometrial cancer progression, using global genomic approaches in endometrial cancer cells.
Carl Gregory
Texas A&M University-College Station, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research
Measure how cDkkMo, a dog-specific antisense morpholino that blocks production of the Wnt-inhibitor protein Dkk-1, affects growth, survival and stress resistance of canine osteosarcoma cell lines and canine patient-derived xenografts.
The school
Stanford University: 87 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 739 research doctorates a year.
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