Prostate Cancer

Emmanuel S. Antonarakis, MBBCh, assistant professor, Johns Hopkins Medicine, on the coming importance of being tested for the ARV7 marker and future treatments for patients with the marker.

Joe O'Sullivan, MD, on utilizing radium-223 treatment earlier in patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC).

Several recent trials have shown that a combination of docetaxel in conjunction with androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) is optimal in treating oligometastatic prostate cancer.

From its approval in May 2013 to recently being considered as a combination treatment with other drugs, radium-223 dichloride shows great potential in positively impacting treatment for mCRPC, according to Dr. Michael Morris.

Aaron Spitz, MD, talks about the emerging uses of telemedicine in urology. Telemedicine allows medical professionals to remotely diagnose and sometimes even treat patients through a variety of technology, including smartphones and tablet devices.

"We should be doing this, because we understand the disease, we see these patients, and we're not just surgeons, Dr. Adam Kibel said. "We were giving them medications to control their BPH before we diagnosed them with cancer."

With novel treatments such as abiraterone acetate (Zytiga) and enzalutamide (Xtandi) emerging and financial challenges of diminished reimbursement faced by urology practices mounting, urology groups are beginning to offer in-office dispensing to their metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) patients.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified processed meat as carcinogenic to humans and red meat as probably carcinogenic to humans.

Patients who had prostate cancer recurrence after radical prostatectomy lived significantly longer with the addition of hormonal therapy to salvage radiotherapy, long-term follow-up from a randomized trial showed.

Ultra-hypofractionated radiation therapy for low-risk prostate cancer led to significantly lower rates of bowel and urinary dysfunction compared with patients treated with conventional radiotherapy regimens.

Hypofractionated radiotherapy can achieve similar cure rates with similar side effects compared with conventional radiotherapy for men with low-risk, early prostate cancer, according to a recent study.

The FDA has announced clearance for a minimally invasive high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) prostate tissue ablation device called Sonablate 450, making HIFU available in the United States for the first time.

Researchers note that chronic Hedgehog (Hh) pathway stimulation has been shown in prostate, lung, and ovarian cancers, and that zinc levels decrease early in prostate cancer continuing to castration-resistant disease. Researchers are exploring whether or not zinc may suppress the autocatalysis in the Hh precursor and inhibit production of biologically active Hh ligand.

Tasquinimod demonstrated promise in phase II trials but failed to improve overall survival in a phase III trial in treatment-naive metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer; some experts believe this failure highlights the need for more intelligent clinical trial designs in prostate cancer.

Accelerated hypofractionated radiotherapy using a schedule of 60 Gy in 20 fractions of 3 Gy delivered in 4 weeks was found to be comparable to the conventional schedule of 74 Gy/37 of 2 GY delivered in 7.2 weeks in patients with localized prostate cancer taking androgen deprivation therapy.

Androgen deprivation therapy has been the standard of care for patients with advanced prostate cancer (PC), because these agents inhibit cancer progression in the early stages of disease.

A subanalysis of the ALSYMPCA trial suggests that chemotherapy can be safely administered after treatment with radium-223 in patients with metastatic CRPC and bone metastasis.

Neal D. Shore, MD, FACS, Atlantic Urology Clinics, discusses glypican-1 as a biomarker for prostate cancer.

Howard M. Sandler, MD, MS, FASTRO, Cedars Sinai, discusses patient benefit and toxicities of a phase III study of docetaxel with hormonal and radiation therapy of patients with prostate cancer.

Fred Saad, MD, FRCS, University of Montreal, discusses the benefit of radium-223 for the treatment of patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC).

Targeted Oncology spoke with two leading experts in the prostate cancer field about the range of available treatments and their current applications in men with mCRPC.

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) have been recognized as a potential source of prostate cancer seeding to distant metastatic sites (typically bone) for over a century.

Bone metastases in metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) can invade a range of sites in the skeleton where they precipitate a spectrum of pathological processes that increase morbidity, negatively affect quality of life, and decrease survival.

Scott Eggener, MD, associate professor of surgery, co-director, Prostate Cancer Program, director, Transitional and Outcomes Research, Section of Urology, The University of Chicago Medicine, discusses racial disparities in men with prostate cancer.

Stacy Loeb, MD, assistant professor, Urology and Population Health, NYU Langone Medical Center, discusses the controversy of screening and treatment in men with prostate cancer, as well as data from the National Prostate Cancer Register (NPCR) of Sweden.

Administering 6 cycles of docetaxel at the beginning of androgen-deprivation therapy (ADT) to patients with metastatic, hormone-sensitive prostate cancer (mHSPC) resulted in a significantly longer overall survival (OS) than ADT alone.

A paper published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, authored by Tosoian et al, reports on the long-term outcomes of prospective active surveillance (AS) of patients with favorable-risk prostate cancer.

Radium-223 dichloride (Xofigo) has shown a significant survival advantage in the treatment of patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) who have symptomatic bone metastases, and a multidisciplinary approach to treatment has become more widely practiced in community clinics.

James Kearns, MD, discusses genetic correction of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) and how it can reduce the number of patients diagnosed with potentially insignificant prostate cancer

Judd W. Moul, MD, urologic oncologist, Duke Medicine, discusses the impact of immunotherapy in prostate cancer.