Catherine Applegate, a Beckman Institute Postdoctoral Fellow, will present "RAGE in prostate cancer: a novel diagnostic and potentially therapeutic biomarker" at the Beckman Institute Director's Seminar at noon on Thursday, Nov. 30 in 1005 Beckman.
Registration is required to attend. Lunch will be provided.
"RAGE in prostate cancer: a novel diagnostic and potentially therapeutic biomarker"
The receptor for advanced glycation end-products, or RAGE, has been implicated in driving prostate cancer, or PCa, growth, aggression, and metastasis through the fueling of chronic inflammation in the tumor microenvironment. RAGE is activated by several ligands, most notably advanced glycation end-products, or AGEs, found at high levels in processed foods that make up a significant proportion of Western diets.
Our lab has examined clinical associations of RAGE differentiating normal prostate from PCa and between tumor grades. We found that RAGE expression was highly likely to be increased in PCa when compared to normal prostate (odds ratio [OR]: 11.3; 95% CI: 4.4-29.1) and that RAGE was overexpressed in high-grade PCa when compared to low-grade PCa (OR: 2.5; 95% CI: 1.8-3.4). Our lab has additionally developed an imaging platform by which to non-invasively monitor RAGE expression in tumor tissues over time and found that mice fed a low-AGE diet respond with lower tumor RAGE expression and improved diagnostic markers compared with animals maintained on a high-AGE diet.
These data demonstrate that RAGE is strongly tied to PCa progression and can serve as an effective diagnostic target to differentiate between healthy prostate, low-grade PCa, and high-grade PCa with potential therapeutic applications.
Catherine Applegate was selected as a 2020 Beckman Institute Postdoctoral Fellow and is now in the final semester of her fellowship. She earned her B.S. in clinical nutrition from the University of California, Davis; her M.S. in human nutrition and R.D.N. from Texas State University, San Marcos; and her Ph.D. in nutritional sciences from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Applegate's postdoctoral work at the Beckman Institute spans both nutritional science and bioengineering. Her work aims to identify pharmaceutical and dietary interventions effective against prostate cancer through the validation of novel imaging strategies to detect early tumor responses to therapies in a preclinical setting, ultimately reducing the time and costs associated with cancer treatments for improved patient outcomes.
In addition to her academic pursuits, Applegate is a member of the Cancer Research Advocacy Group, or CRAG; received the Brandt Family Young Scholar Award at the Mayo Clinic Individualizing Medicine Conference in 2021; and received the Mistletoe Research Fellowship in November 2023.
