By Andrea Hargraves 
The Portuguese League Against Cancer, with the support of Gillette, was awarded the LPCC/Gillette Medical Research Grant – Prostate Cancer for the MICROBIO-PCa project by Bruno Jorge Pereira, Urologist and Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Health Sciences of the University of Inland Beira (FCS-UBI) and a collaborating member of Center for Research in the Health Sciences (CICS-UBI), UBI told Teaching Journal.
In a note sent to our newsroom, it was explained that “the study will be developed by a research team led by Silvia Socorro, who is also a professor and researcher at UBI, which also includes Katia Vaz, Lara Fonseca, Sara Correa and Mariana Vigo, who has been studying metabolic properties for prostate cancer.
According to UBI, “The project is collaborating with other CICS-UBI researchers with extensive experience in the field of microbiology, such as Ana Palmira de Oliveira and Carlos Gaspar, as well as other physicians from the urology service at the IPO in Coimbra, directed by Carlos Rapacha” .
The same observation states that “MICROBIO-PCa intends to investigate how bacteria in the tumor microenvironment cooperate with prostate cancer cells, providing them with energy substrates and inducing metabolic changes that favor disease progression.”
For the researchers, “This is a highly innovative project, the results of which will enable the establishment of a relationship between the bacterial population, metabolic profile and histopathological characteristics of prostate cancer, which can be used in clinical diagnosis, and open pathways for new treatment strategies based on integrated microbial and metabolomic analysis.”
The same note also notes that “one of the biggest clinical and research challenges in prostate cancer is the development of strategies that allow the progression of the disease to be controlled to more advanced stages, i.e., castration-resistant prostate cancer. In recent years, the prostate germinoma has emerged. Some of the existing bacterial strains have been identified. In the tumor microenvironment, it is likely to be involved in the development of the disease. It may be related to the infection process.”