This afternoon I am off to the American Society for Clinical Oncology Genitourinary Cancers Symposium (ASCO GU) in San Francisco. There has already been some information leaking to the media about some of the presentations that will be going on at the conference. One such “leak” is about findings from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center [...]
Last year GenomeDx Biosciences presented data showing that its Decipher® Prostate Cancer Classifier (the test), a genomic test, is capable of predicting the probability that a man will eventually develop metastatic prostate cancer, despite having surgery as a primary treatment for prostate cancer. The company claims that the test out performs other existing tests of [...]
I have often had men recently diagnosed with advanced, metastatic prostate cancer call me and ask if surgery makes any sense for them to consider. I have never been sure how to respond given that their cancer is known to be already out of their gland. In response to this common question, researchers from the [...]
Knowing the negative prognostic factors for successful treatment when you have a a biochemical recurrence (PSA only) of your prostate cancer is important. These factors can help you make your treatment decisions because they assist you in evaluating your possible clinical outcome. In a single institutional review of negative prognostic outcomes of salvage radiotherapy in [...]
We have become very fortunate over the last 6 years because our arsenal of potential drugs to treat advanced, metastatic prostate cancer has grown. All of our new drugs extend life and most offer palliation of pain. As I have discussed in prior posts we are still in a quandary about how best to sequence [...]
Because of the large amount of prostate cancer screening there has been a major shift in initial staging in prostate cancer in western countries, with the incidence of metastases at diagnosis decreasing from over 50% in the 1970s to currently less than 10%. Despite this very significant drop in late stage diagnoses prostate cancer is [...]
FROM this blog on September 9, 2015 ) According to Michael Jan, MD, and his collaborators at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden those of us who are experiencing high levels of stress need to be cautious. Their findings boil down to the fact that our stress could allow our prostate cancer to kill us. [...]
The development of bone metastases is often been viewed as having significant negative implications for long term survival in men with metastatic castrate resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC). It is generally believed that bone metastases prognosticates a negative impact on both their quality of life and on survival. Contradicting this commonly held belief has been some [...]
Provenge, despite its demonstrated survival advantage, continues to be knocked as a viable treatment for men with castrate-resistant prostate cancer. What is Provenge? Provenge is immunotherapy for men with metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer. In other words, Provenge might help men live longer after their cancer has spread outside of the prostate and are no [...]
At the current AUA Annual Meeting going on in New Orleans, there was a presentation given by Haitao Zhang and colleagues. They described their work developing a novel blood-based assay (test) for detecting androgen receptor (AR) splice variants in men with advanced prostate cancer. Their work relies on the premise that AR-V7 expression underlies resistance [...]
