One of the newer drugs and one that has recently had great air play is the bone targeting radiopharmaceutical drug radium-223 or Xofigo. Currently, it is approved for men with castrate resistant prostate cancer with bone metastases. The problem is that currently Xofigo is only approved for one round of treatment using 6 monthly infusions. [...]
Prostate cancer tends to metastasize to bones as opposed to soft tissue and other organs. We have no idea why it does have a preference for bone, but it does. Developing bone metastases in prostrate cancer is a very strong negative prognostic indicator. Prostate cancer’s tendency to favor bone over soft tissue causes significant morbidity [...]
Again and again I have mentioned the huge need we have for the development of reliable bio-markers. Reliable bio-markers will allow us to know which men will respond positively to a treatment (also those who will not) and when a treatment is still effective (also when it no longer is effective). These biomarkers really don’t [...]
Researchers at Queen’s University in Belfast along with the Belfast Trust are conducting a clinical trial evaluating the combination of two radiotherapy treatments, Radium 223 and Pelvic Radiation using Volumetric Modulated Arc Therapy (VMAT) in men with bone positive advanced prostate cancer. The trial, being called ADRRAD trial, involves combining androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) along [...]
Not often discussed, but a valuable measure of prostate cancer bone activity is serum (in the blood) alkaline phosphatase. It is a normal enzyme produced naturally by the body. Everyone produces some of this enzyme regardless of his or her state of health, gender, or age. The tissues that produce the most alkaline phosphatase are the [...]
Researchers at the Duke Cancer Institute along with other cancer centers, in the largest analysis of its kind have found that the organ site where prostate cancer spreads has a direct impact on a man’s survival. They found that men with lymph-only metastasis statistically have the longest overall survival possibility, while those with liver involvement [...]
The common belief is that if you are diagnosed with prostate cancer that has already developed metastases only a systemic treatment will provide a life extending benefit. In other cancers it has been shown that the treatment of the primary tumor improves survival (tumor debulking). To find out if, in fact radiotherapy treatment of the [...]
Radium-223 (Xofigo) is a drug for men with castrate resistant metastatic prostate cancer (mCRCP) who have multiple bone metastases. Radium-223 selectively targets bone metastases by mimicking calcium, which is attracted to the bone, especially to the fast growing areas of the tumor in the bone. It emits an alpha-emitting dose of radiation, which is mostly contained [...]
There has been a lot of buzz around the new scanning contrasts that have come into limited usage for evaluating metastasized cancer cells that are in the bones. Despite the enthusiasm from the prostate and breast cancer communities, CMS (Medicare) continues to limit its financial coverage for PET scans using the contrast NaF-18 even though [...]
As I have said before, the next big step in the clinical care of men with prostate cancer will be in not in the development of a new drug, but in our growing knowledge of how to sequence and combine our new drugs. Today’s post provides just one example of this new type of breakthrough [...]
