BACKGROUND: Technology development to enable the culture of human prostate cancer (PCa) progenitor cells is required for the identification of new, potentially curative therapies for PCa.

OBJECTIVE: We established and characterized patient-derived conditionally reprogrammed cells (CRCs) to assess their biological properties and to apply these to test the efficacies of drugs.

DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: CRCs were established from seven patient samples with disease ranging from primary PCa to advanced castration-resistant PCa (CRPC). The CRCs were characterized by genomic, transcriptomic, protein expression, and drug profiling.

OUTCOME MEASUREMENTS AND STATISTICAL ANALYSIS: The phenotypic quantification of the CRCs was done based on immunostaining followed by image analysis with Advanced Cell Classifier using Random Forest supervised machine learning. Copy number aberrations (CNAs) were called from whole-exome sequencing and transcriptomics using in-house pipelines. Dose-response measurements were used to generate multiparameter drug sensitivity scores using R-statistical language.

RESULTS AND LIMITATIONS: We generated six benign CRC cultures which all had an androgen receptor-negative, basal/transit-amplifying phenotype with few CNAs. In three-dimensional cell culture, these cells could re-express the androgen receptor. The CRCs from a CRPC patient (HUB.5) displayed multiple CNAs, many of which were shared with the parental tumor. We carried out high-throughput drug-response studies with 306 emerging and clinical cancer drugs. Using the benign CRCs as controls, we identified the Bcl-2 family inhibitor navitoclax as the most potent cancer-specific drug for the CRCs from a CRPC patient. Other drug efficacies included taxanes, mepacrine, and retinoids.

CONCLUSIONS: Comprehensive cancer pharmacopeia-wide drug testing of CRCs from a CRPC patient highlighted both known and novel drug sensitivities in PCa, including navitoclax, which is currently being tested in clinical trials of CRPC.

PATIENT SUMMARY: We describe an approach to generate patient-derived cancer cells from advanced prostate cancer and apply such cells to discover drugs that could be applied in clinical trials for castration-resistant prostate cancer.