Barry Taylor

About Barry Taylor

One of the challenges in prostate cancer care is distinguishing men with high-risk disease requiring aggressive therapy from those who can be managed with active surveillance. The work’s proposal is based on findings from his recent prostate oncogenome project. Dr. Taylor and colleagues at MSKCC found certain global patterns of DNA alterations in primary tumors, called Copy Number Alterations (CNAs). CNAs are alterations of the DNA that result in the cell having an abnormal number of copies of one or more sections of the DNA. Dr. Taylor’s results showed that CNAs are associated with disease recurrence after radical prostatectomy. His preliminary studies showed that patients with these DNA alterations in their tumors were highly likely to develop castration-resistant disease. This study of the clinical importance and pathogenicity of DNA copy number alterations will, if successful, deliver a clinical diagnostic test that could impact treatment decisions in men diagnosed with prostate cancer.