A team of experts have said that a new discovery might help scientists develop more effective treatment to fight prostate cancer cells.

The researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have found an unexpected link between the twocommon prostate cancer treatments. This may soon make killing prostate cancer cells easier for the doctors. Experts said that the drugs that might benefit from the discovery are already being developed and they also said that the clinical trials to determine if the new discovery can improve treatment might be conducted in the coming years.

Healthcare experts said that the new discovery will allow doctors to better determine which forms of treatment will most benefit individual patients. Data showed that Prostate cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer death among men in the US. Treatments for the disease include radiation and androgen ablation.

The researchers found that a cellular signaling pathway activated by radiation may also control cells' sensitivity to androgen, which is a male hormone that is required by prostate cancer cells to grow.Androgen and androgen sensitivitycan affect how susceptible prostate cancer cells are to the radiation treatment.

UVA researcher Dan Gioeli, PhD, of the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Cancer Biology and the UVA Cancer Center said, “Now we have a novel link between two different standards of care for advanced prostate cancer. For locally advanced prostate cancer, radiation therapy is one of the standards of care, and that induces DNA damage, which would activate this pathway. Another standard of care for metastatic prostate cancer is androgen ablation, and that acts to inhibit androgen receptor activity. Now we have a new molecular understanding of how those two different standards of care might be connected."