Rice University, March 18, 2025 – Erzsébet Merényi, a statistics research professor at Rice University, along with co-investigators from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, have been awarded $1 million by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT). The funding will support the development of artificial intelligence (AI) tools designed to identify lethal forms of prostate cancer earlier and improve treatment selection.
Prostate cancer is the most frequently diagnosed cancer among men, but patient outcomes vary significantly. Current therapies often target male hormones like testosterone, which fuel cancer growth. These androgen signaling inhibitors can slow or shrink the cancer, but some cancers eventually develop resistance. For those men with castration-resistant prostate cancer, treatment options are limited, and survival rates are poor.
The research supported by the CPRIT grant centers on three key areas:
- Revolutionary noninvasive imaging, developed in Pratip Bhattacharya’s laboratory, will produce real-time, in vivo temporal and spectral profiles of tumor metabolism with unprecedented detail. This will facilitate the sensitive discrimination among different aberrant states and enable mapping of tumor heterogeneity.
- Merényi’s team will apply an advanced AI approach inspired by the brain’s networks. This AI is particularly adept at extracting insights from complex, high-dimensional data.
- Ongoing clinical trials in Dr. Patrick Pilié’s laboratory, focusing on systemic therapy with androgen signaling inhibitors, will provide rich human data on therapeutic efficacy. Data from mouse models in Bhattacharya’s lab will also be used. These clinical data will help reveal variations in metabolic signatures, which will aid in identifying clinically relevant biomarkers that signal which patients are at the greatest risk of developing aggressive forms of the disease early in their diagnosis.
Successful implementation of these three components aims to enable earlier and more precise interventions, personalized to each patient’s cancer profile. A unique and notable aspect of the research is how the AI approaches, initially developed by Merényi’s group for astronomy and Earth remote sensing, can now potentially benefit patients with prostate cancer and other cancers. This highlights the advantages of cross-disciplinary collaborations. This new research will use neural map-based machine learning to uncover hidden patterns in the high-dimensional data. These patterns, which may be subtle, may be crucial in helping clinicians detect aggressive prostate cancer earlier and deliver more effective treatment plans, with the goal of ultimately improving patient outcomes.
By creating AI-driven models capable of handling the complexity of multimodal cancer data, this CPRIT-funded project may potentially serve as a model for AI applications in other areas of oncology and personalized medicine. CPRIT leads the state’s fight against cancer. Through its research programs, CPRIT has awarded over $3.7 billion in grants to Texas institutions and organizations, while also recruiting top-tier researchers, supporting innovative startups, and providing millions of cancer prevention services throughout the state. This recent grant further highlights CPRIT’s dedication to supporting innovative research that has the potential to change cancer diagnosis and treatment.
