Adenocarcinoma of the prostate can vary widely in its clinical aggressiveness. Some patients with prostatic cancers can live for many years with localized disease without apparent metastases while in other patients, the prostatic cancer metastasizes rapidly. If the prostatic cancer is localized (Stage B1 and B2) then radical prostatectomy or radiation therapy offers a curative approach for management of this lesion. However, if the lesion only appears to be clinically localized but has already produced micrometastases, then radical surgery or radiation therapy will not be curative and aggressive systemic therapy would be required. Thus, if a diagnostic method could be developed which could index the metastatic ability of an individual primary prostatic adenocarcinoma then the clinical management of these tumors would be improved. Unfortunately, at present, there are no diagnostic methods which can accurately assess the metastatic capability of these tumors. Within the last few years a large amount of research has demonstrated that nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) has the potential to be a powerful technique to non-invasively detect disease processes. One area in which NMR has been successful is in the exploration of the physical properties of tissue water in cancerous versus normal tissue. Investigations have shown that the NMR relaxation times (i.e. T1 (spin-lattice) and T2 (spin-spin)) of water protons are distinguishable between homologous normal and tumor tissues for many different types of human and animal cancers. The primary aim of this proposal is to determine whether these NMR techniques can be utilized in combination with biochemical markers to """"""""fingerprint"""""""" the metastatic potential of cancerous lesions.
