Prostate cancer is common, but only some tumours become dangerous. The difficult part for doctors and patients is knowing early which cancers are likely to spread and which will stay slow-growing. In her doctoral dissertation, Mina Sattari looks at that problem from a new angle: instead of focusing on single findings, it examines the control systems of the tumour as a whole.
Every cell uses a set of “instructions” to make the building blocks it needs. Alongside these instructions are many “switches” that do not make building blocks themselves but control when the instructions are used. By studying both the instructions and the switches together, this work shows how cancers change their behaviour as they grow, spread, and respond to treatment.
Sattari’s research combines real patient material with carefully designed laboratory models and modern data analysis. Looking across these different sources makes it possible to find signals that are not just interesting in the lab but also visible in patient samples. In practice, this means spotting patterns that show when a tumour is beginning to move from a manageable state to a more aggressive one.
Several clear themes emerge. First, aggressive tumours tend to use certain control patterns that help them adapt and survive, especially under treatment pressure. Second, reading both the instructions and the switches paints a far more reliable picture than looking at either alone. Third, compact sets of signals could one day help doctors sort patients into the right care pathways earlier, improving outcomes while avoiding unnecessary treatments for those who do not need them.
Why does this matter? Early and accurate risk assessment can reduce the physical and emotional burden on patients and families, limit side effects from treatments that may not help, and direct healthcare resources where they are most needed. It can also support more confident shared decision-making between patients and clinicians.
The findings point toward next steps for the field: validating these patterns in larger, independent patient groups and developing small, practical marker panels to support earlier risk assessment and treatment planning.
“By reading both the ‘instructions’ that cells follow and the ‘switches’ that control them, we can better predict which cancers are likely to become aggressive. That knowledge helps patients get the right care at the right time,” says Sattari.
The work was carried out in Tampere University’s Molecular Biology of Prostate Cancer group (MBPCG), led by Professor Tapio Visakorpi. In practical terms, the results support development of biomarker panels combining lncRNAs with PCGs for earlier risk stratification, and they nominate testable targets, such as EPCART and TMEM18, for functional follow-up.
Public defence on Friday 12 September
The doctoral dissertation of DVM Mina Sattari in the field of Cancer Genetics titled Detection of Differentially Expressed Long Non-Coding RNAs and Protein-Coding Genes in Metastatic Castration-Resistant Prostate Cancer: Special emphasis on their value as biomarkers will be publicly examined at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Technology at Tampere University at 12 o’clock on Friday 12.9.2025 at Kauppi campus, Arvo building, auditorium F115 (Arvo Ylpön katu 34, Tampere). The Opponent will be Professor Sampsa Hautaniemi from University of Helsinki. The Custos will be Professor Tapio Visakorpi from Faculty of Medicine and Health Technology, Tampere University.