A team of researchers from the University of Adelaide are spearheading a new direction on prostate cancer, which they claim could yield potential new treatments for the disease.

The researchers have just begun new studies which they hope will help overcome a major problem that limits the treatments for metastatic prostate cancer, and improve men’s chances of surviving.

Currently, prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in Australian men, and the second most common cause of cancer-related death in men.

To treat prostate cancer, researchers around the world have been developing new drugs that block the actions of male hormones, called androgens, in prostate cancer cells, but most patients become resistant to these treatments after time. The new research from Adelaide aims to find a new way of destroying this resistant cancer cells.

"This global project is a completely new direction for prostate cancer research, and we are very excited to be a major part of it," says Professor Wayne Tilley, Head of the University of Adelaide's Dame Roma Mitchell Cancer Research Laboratories.

"Until now the focus has been on finding drugs that will block the action of androgen in prostate cancer cells. However, that simply isn't working - the cancer cells adapt and start to produce super-active 'sensors' of androgen action (super-active androgen receptors) that are not inhibited by the current drugs.

"As a result, for many men with resistant disease, current treatments only extend their lives by a short period of time. We haven't made the major breakthrough that many researchers had been hoping for," Professor Tilley says.

The team at the Adelaide Prostate Cancer Research Centre, in the University's Dame Roma Mitchell Cancer Research Laboratories, is the Australian arm of a major international collaboration spanning the US, UK, Belgium, Singapore and Australia which has collectively decided to take a new approach to prostate cancer treatment.