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In 1941 two Chicago surgeons showed that removing a man's testicles, or giving him oestrogen, made advanced prostate cancer shrink and his blood chemistry improve, and that giving testosterone made it worse. It was the first time any cancer in any organ had been made to regress by a drug or a hormone.
Charles Huggins and Clarence Hodges published the first of the Studies on Prostatic Cancer in Cancer Research in 1941. They measured serum acid and alkaline phosphatase in men with metastatic carcinoma of the prostate, then castrated them or gave them oestrogen, and watched the phosphatases fall and the men improve; injecting androgen sent the disease the other way.
The experiment did two things at once. It established that a human cancer can depend on a circulating hormone for its growth, which is the founding observation of systemic cancer therapy, and it gave that cancer a blood measurement that tracked it, which is the founding observation of the tumour marker. Everything on this page that suppresses, blocks or manipulates androgen descends from it, and so does the whole idea that a cancer has a dependency you can withdraw. Huggins shared the 1966 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the work.
Europe PMC indexes no abstract for the 1941 article, so OnCo carries no figures from it. The article was reprinted as a landmark in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians in 1972, which is the copy Europe PMC holds (PMID 4625049, DOI 10.3322/canjclin.22.4.232).
The origin of hormone therapy for cancer, and the reason prostate cancer is treated by taking something away rather than adding a cytotoxic drug. More than eighty years later, every man who starts androgen deprivation is having this experiment repeated on him, and the disease is still defined by whether it has stopped responding to it.
One trial page on OnCo cites this paper by its DOI; this record gives the citation a page of its own so a reader can follow it without leaving OnCo. Read the abstract above alongside the citing page listed under Related; the record was created automatically from the Europe PMC entry and its figures have not been checked by hand.
The first evidence that resistance to hormone therapy in prostate cancer is an adaptation of the target rather than an escape from it, which is why the field kept building better androgen receptor drugs instead of abandoning the pathway.
Shares In vivo amplification of the androgen receptor gene and progression of human prostate cancer, Castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC), Prostate cancer roadmap: from Huggins and the discovery that a cancer can depend on a hormone, through the PSA epidemic and what it cost, the androgen receptor drugs, the DNA repair subset and PSMA, to a 2032 registry watch, Androgen receptor and the tag prostate-evidence.
Shares Transdermal oestradiol for androgen suppression in prostate cancer: long-term cardiovascular outcomes from the randomised Prostate Adenocarcinoma Transcutaneous Hormone (PATCH) trial programme, Androgen deprivation therapy (ADT), Metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer, Prostate cancer roadmap: from Huggins and the discovery that a cancer can depend on a hormone, through the PSA epidemic and what it cost, the androgen receptor drugs, the DNA repair subset and PSMA, to a 2032 registry watch and the tag prostate-evidence.
Shares Castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC), Prostate cancer roadmap: from Huggins and the discovery that a cancer can depend on a hormone, through the PSA epidemic and what it cost, the androgen receptor drugs, the DNA repair subset and PSMA, to a 2032 registry watch, Androgen receptor, Acquired resistance to every therapy and the tag prostate-evidence.
Shares In vivo amplification of the androgen receptor gene and progression of human prostate cancer, Castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC), Prostate cancer roadmap: from Huggins and the discovery that a cancer can depend on a hormone, through the PSA epidemic and what it cost, the androgen receptor drugs, the DNA repair subset and PSMA, to a 2032 registry watch, Androgen receptor and the tag prostate-evidence.
Shares Castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC), Prostate cancer roadmap: from Huggins and the discovery that a cancer can depend on a hormone, through the PSA epidemic and what it cost, the androgen receptor drugs, the DNA repair subset and PSMA, to a 2032 registry watch, Androgen receptor, Acquired resistance to every therapy and the tag prostate-evidence.
Shares Castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC), Prostate cancer roadmap: from Huggins and the discovery that a cancer can depend on a hormone, through the PSA epidemic and what it cost, the androgen receptor drugs, the DNA repair subset and PSMA, to a 2032 registry watch, Acquired resistance to every therapy, Metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer and the tag prostate-evidence.
Shares Castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC), The undruggable drivers, Prostate cancer roadmap: from Huggins and the discovery that a cancer can depend on a hormone, through the PSA epidemic and what it cost, the androgen receptor drugs, the DNA repair subset and PSMA, to a 2032 registry watch, Androgen receptor and the tag prostate-evidence.
Shares Castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC), Prostate cancer roadmap: from Huggins and the discovery that a cancer can depend on a hormone, through the PSA epidemic and what it cost, the androgen receptor drugs, the DNA repair subset and PSMA, to a 2032 registry watch, Androgen receptor, Acquired resistance to every therapy and the tag prostate-evidence.