Abstract

Prostate cancer (PCa) accounts for 29% of all expected cancer diagnoses in men in 2024, but patients presenting with different disease stages can have significantly different outcomes. Patients with indolent PCa may experience little to no impact on their quality of life and have a 5-year survival as high as 98%, but progression to aggressive disease causes 5-year survival to plummet to 30%. Patients with the most lethal form of the disease, metastatic castration-resistant PCa (mCRPC), have a median survival of only 5.5 months if they become resistant to treatment. Due to this clinical heterogeneity, it is critical to quickly and accurately stratify patients to match them with the appropriate treatment plans. To address this need, this thesis focuses on the development of novel tools that may be applied to diagnostic and prognostic biomarker detection in PCa by 1) creating a pipeline to aid in analysis of liquid biopsies, 2) developing a tool for discovering fusion-derived circular RNAs as potential biomarkers and 3) identifying an epigenetic signature for stratification of localized PCa.

Committee Chair

Christopher Maher

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Author's Department

Biology & Biomedical Sciences (Human & Statistical Genetics)

Author's School

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

5-9-2024

Language

English (en)

Author's ORCID

0000-0002-9396-5658

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