PIPages
Labs

Joshua Campbell

Boston University, MA·Genetics

African American men have the highest rates of prostate cancer and prostate cancer death in the United States. The team has shown that African American men with low-risk prostate cancer have twice the risk of death of men from other racial groups.

Fields

Genetics

Medicine & Clinical Research

Public Health & Epidemiology

Topics

prostate cancer

cancer health disparities

African American men

Grants
1 known grant, through Apr 2027

What they work on

  1. Identify genetic alterations linked to tumor grade by whole exome sequencing of archived prostate cancers from 300 African American and 200 European American men from Boston Medical Center and UCSF.
  2. Characterize gene activity and protein profiles of prostate epithelial cell populations in organoids from African American and European American men, using single-cell RNA sequencing and mass spectrometry.
  3. Develop new prostate cell models from African American patients with conditional reprogramming, then use CRISPR/Cas9 editing of ancestry- and grade-linked driver genes to test whether their effects depend on ancestral background.

More about the research

The causes are many. This project tests one possibility: that low-risk tumors in African American men carry distinct genetic changes that make them more aggressive. Studying this has been hard because few laboratory cell models come from men of different ancestries.

Why it matters

Identifying the genetic changes that make prostate cancer more aggressive in African American men could eventually improve their treatment and help reduce cancer health disparities. The new collection of prostate cell models from African American patients would also give other scientists tools to study these disparities.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

Investigating the mechanisms of driver genes associated with ancestry and aggressiveness in prostate cancer

NIH · May 2021 – Apr 2027

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The school

Boston University: 26 labs on PI Pages, $784M a year on research, 630 research doctorates a year.

More about Boston University

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