This new series of Prospect articles on prostate cancer reviews different aspects of the pathophysiological role of androgen and its receptor. The focus of the series is on the pathways that are likely to affect disease progression towards an androgen-independent phenotype. This progression is of profound medical significance because it causes treatment failure. The current therapy for prostate cancer involves androgen ablation or blockade of the androgen receptor (AR); however, a significantly high percentage of treated prostate cancers eventually grows despite either castration levels of androgen or the presence of anti-androgens.
In the first article, Dehm and Tindall reveal the prostate universe in a comprehensive analysis of the genes regulated by AR. The Prospect article by Dehm and Tindall focuses on the multi-functional activities attributed to androgen and surveys gene expression profile studies recently published in different systems. The authors succeed in reconciling the studies with a unifying hypothesis: the predominant effect attributed to androgen is largely due to changes in the levels of secretory proteins, cell proliferation, and survival.