October the 25th, 2024 – Meet Vini, the creation of a group of talented Croatian scientists who have made a major step forward in future prostate cancer treatment.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, unfortunately, prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers affecting men worldwide. Although available therapies have advanced very significantly, a major challenge remains to prevent the progression of the disease to its most dangerous, resistant form.
In response to this challenge, a multidisciplinary team of researchers and doctors, led by Croatian scientists from the Ruđer Bošković Institute (IRB), have achieved a significant breakthrough. They have developed an innovative computer tool called Vini, which is designed to predict the most effective drug combinations in the treatment of castration-resistant prostate cancer.
The main goal of the Vini tool is to prevent the progression of this devastating disease to its most deadly stage, known as therapy-resistant prostate cancer. These results were recently published in the prestigious journal Scientific Report, according to the RBI.
“Prostate cancer is the most common newly diagnosed cancer in men in the Republic of Croatia. According to data from the Cancer Registry, 2,299 cases of prostate cancer were diagnosed in 2020 in Croatia alone. According to the latest available data on mortality in Croatia, in 2021, prostate cancer was the 9th leading cause of death in men.
It’s also the third most common malignant cause of death in men, after lung cancer and colon and rectal cancer,” the Institute stated.
The team of Croatian scientists also explained that in its early stages, prostate cancer is often successfully treated with hormone therapy, but as time passes, cancer cells typically become resistant to standard therapies. “This resistance allows the disease to develop into castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC), which makes the disease significantly more dangerous and very difficult to treat. For this reason, researchers and clinicians are constantly working to find new therapeutic strategies that could prevent the progression of the disease to this deadly stage,” the IRB points out, adding that one of the key challenges in the treatment of prostate cancer is finding optimal combinations of drugs that can simultaneously target several different pathways within cancer cells. In this way, the possibility of stopping the disease entirely increases. This is exactly where the innovative new Vini tool comes into play.
Vini is a sophisticated computer tool developed to predict the effectiveness of drug combinations in the fight against prostate cancer. Its development is the result of close cooperation between Croatian scientists from the IRB and doctors from KBC Sestre milosrdnice in Zagreb. This tool uses vast amounts of data from scientific databases, including KEGG, DrugBank, Pubchem and the Protein Data Bank, to analyse the biological processes occurring inside the cancer cells themselves and suggest the best possible drug combinations.
“We wanted to create a tool that can comprehensively analyse drug interactions at the cellular level and predict their effectiveness in combination therapy,” explained Dr. Draško Tomić, head of research from the Centre for Informatics and Computing at the IRB. “We took into account all known target genes, proteins and molecular interactions and were able to propose new drug combinations that could help treat prostate cancer before it becomes incurable.”
Through his analyses, Vini was able to identify several key targets within cancer cells, including ALK, BCL-2, mTOR, DNA, and the androgen axis. By attacking these pathways simultaneously, Vini proposed drug combinations that could prevent the disease from progressing to the castration-resistant stage. Although the results are currently based on theoretical models, the research team believes that these findings have the potential to lead to new, more effective treatments in the future.
In order to carry out such complex analyses, the research team relied on the support of the EuroHPC joint initiative, which gave them access to the Vega supercomputer, located at the Slovenian Institute of Information Sciences in Maribor (IZUM). The key role of Slovenian experts and resources of the national supercomputer network (SLING) was to provide all the necessary capacities for performing complex calculations.
“Without the supercomputer power of Vega, we wouldn’t be able to carry out all the necessary simulations,” emphasised Dr. Draško Tomić, head of research, noting the importance of computer capacities in modern cancer research.
The scientific team behind this research includes Draško Tomić, Karolja Skala, Branka Medved Rogin, Branimir Kolarek and Viktor Bojović, while the clinical partners were Jure Murgić, Ana Fröbe and Antonela Vrljičak from the Department of Oncology and Nuclear Medicine.
The next step for Vini is to test these predictions in clinical trials. If the drug combinations proposed by this innovative creation by Croatian scientists prove successful in practice, we could witness a new chapter in the treatment of prostate cancer. This research illustrates how the application of advanced computational models can be used to solve the most complex medical challenges, opening new perspectives in cancer treatment.
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