Welcome and thanks for visiting!

Our laboratory is based in the Cancer Invasion & Metastasis and Prostate Cancer programs of the Department of Oncology at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD.

We take a rigorous, multi-disciplinary, modality-agnostic, collaborative team science-based approach towards developing innovative therapeutic, prognostic, and predictive strategies for prostate cancer. Towards this goal, our team places an emphasis on exploiting vulnerabilities within the tumor microenvironment (TME), particularly focused on fibroblast activation protein (FAP), or inducing synthetic lethal pathways through epigenetic manipulation of essential regulatory programs. Though significant progress has been made in recent years, prostate cancer still kills ~35,000 U.S. men annually (1 in 44) with an additional 100,000 suffering from painful bone metastases once the disease progresses to the incurable metastatic castration-resistant state (i.e., mCRPC) based on 2024 ACS statistics. This is the most commonly diagnosed non-skin cancer in American men (impacting 1 in 8 during their lifetime with ~300,000 new diagnoses each year) and 2nd leading cause of cancer-related deaths in men behind lung cancer.

To accomplish these goals, we are strategically pursuing innovative therapeutic platforms, including stromal-targeted prodrugs, protoxins, small molecules, and antibodies, in addition to epigenetic modulators and novel drug delivery systems; all of which are designed to reduce toxicity to peripheral non-target tissue (i.e., side effects) while maximizing anti-tumor efficacy (i.e., therapeutic benefit).

W. Nathaniel Brennen, PhD

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR