S, with higher inci dence and mortality in African American men, com pared to other ethnic groups. A factor contributing to these disparities is the more aggressive and perhaps more therapy resistant form of the disease observed among AA men. Understanding the underlying causes of this increased tumor aggressiveness would require a multi prong approach that includes evaluation of potential racial ethnic differences in prostate tumor biology, identi fication of gene environment interactions leading to pros tate inflammation, elucidation of molecular mechanisms associated with PCa chemoresistance, and development of more effective therapeutic interventions for HRPC. Docetaxel, a semi synthetic analog of paclitaxel, has emerged in recent years as the standard of care for chemotherapy of HRPC.

Unfortunately, most HRPC patients treated with DTX ultimately manifest resistance to the drug and succumb to the disease. The mechanisms underlying resistance to DTX in HRPC appear to be diverse and poorly understood. however, a growing body of evidence implicates cellular anti apop totic, stress, and redox signaling pathways in the develop ment of HRPC and DTX resistance. Attaining a mechanistic understanding of DTX induced cell death and DTX resistance in PCa would facilitate the identifica tion of new molecular targets and the development of rational therapeutic strategies aimed at sensitizing HRPC to this and other anti tumor drugs. It is generally accepted that DTX primarily exerts tumor cell death by inducing mitotic catastrophe and caspase 2 and 3 dependent apoptosis following inhibition of microtubule depolymerization.

DTX has also been reported to induce non apoptotic death in tumor cells, both in vitro and in vivo, depending on the dose, cell type, and tumor microenvironment. While mechanistic insights into Anacetrapib non apoptotic, caspase inde pendent cell death induced by paclitaxel have been reported, knowledge of mechanistic events under lying DTX induced caspase independent cell death is very scarce. Caspase dependent and independent cell death pathways co exist in tumor cells and can be triggered in parallel by therapeutic agents. While most efforts in targeting cellular survival pathways have focused on inactivating proteins that antagonize caspase dependent pathways, there is growing consensus that targeting sur vival proteins that antagonize caspase independent or non apoptotic cell death might be a promising strategy for increasing the effectiveness of chemotherapeutic drugs.

The lens epithelium derived growth factor p75 is emerging as a stress response protein that pro motes cell survival against death induced by stressors such as oxidative stress, heat shock, serum starvation, and chemotherapy. This protein is also known as tran scription co activator p75, PC4 and SFRS1 inter acting protein, and dense fine speckled autoantigen of 70 kD.