If doctors could tell which tumors would remain indolent and which would become invasive, they could better treat men with prostate cancer. About 3 percent of men who are diagnosed with prostate cancer have an aggressive type, shown in the images above from the laboratory of associate professor Leszek Kotula, MD, PhD.

Kotula, together with doctoral student Disharee Das, focuses on a gene he discovered two decades ago called Abi1, which causes prostate cancer. They want to learn how it interacts with other genes and whether it plays a role in leukemias and breast, ovarian and other cancers.

This article appears in the winter 2018 issue of Upstate Health magazine. For more on the Abi1 gene and Kotula's prostate cancer research, click here.