Nicholas Mitsiades is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine and Molecular and Cellular Biology at Baylor College of Medicine. He’s also head of Mitsiades Lab, committed to being a national leader in improving the lives of patients with endocrine cancers and other malignancies, via a rapid pace of groundbreaking biomedical scientific discovery and its translation to patient care.

He has received funding from the Conquer Cancer Foundation on two separate occasions for promising research in the field of prostate cancer.

Both his studies were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and in Cancer Research. His initial research describes the first-ever reported mechanism to explain the antitumor effect of the speckle-type POZ protein (SPOP) in prostate cancer and sets the stage for the development of new prostate cancer therapies.

“This finding opens exciting new therapeutic opportunities for prostate cancer. Drugs that can restore the effects of normal SPOP function could become important new therapies for men with advanced and metastatic prostate cancers who are no longer responding to current therapies,” adds Dr. Mitsiades.

His consequent study addressed additional mechanisms used by prostate cancer cells to survive even when testosterone levels in the rest of the body have been reduced by endocrine therapies.

Mitsiades and his team have proposed that the most promising approach would be the early application of a combination of systemic endocrine therapies in order to simultaneously inhibit as many of these resistance mechanisms as possible, delay clinical progression, and maximize clinical benefit.

Nicholas Mitsiades graduated from the Kapodistrian University of Athens in 1995. He later specialized in Hematology/Oncology.

He received a 2009 Conquer Cancer Foundation of ASCO Young Investigator Award (YIA) for his research project “Phase II Trial of Exogenous Testosterone Plus Dutasteride for the Treatment of Castrate Metastatic Prostate Cancer” and a 2011 Conquer Cancer Foundation of ASCO Career Development Award (CDA) for his research “Investigation of the Anti-Cancer Activity of Metformin and Statins in Prostate Cancer.”

“Receiving a 2009 YIA and 2011 CDA helped me transition into a faculty position and launch a lab committed to improving the lives of patients with endocrine cancers via biomedical scientific discovery and its translation to patient care,” said Dr. Mitsiades.