Hot off the press- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved Sanofi-Aventis SA's new chemotherapy drug for advanced prostate cancer. The drug, Jevtana (cabazitaxe) extended by nearly 2-1/2 months the lives of men with prostate cancer tumors that resist standard treatment with hormones as well as chemotherapy. The drug will be used after [...]
Docetaxel is the first-line chemotherapy and the only approved chemotherapy for men with metastatic castrate resistant prostate cancer (CRPC). We all know that Docetaxel will stop working, so what do you do when this happens? […]
The drug is called Cabazitaxel, (it will be named Jevtana) and is made by the French company Sanofi-Aventis SA. Cabazitaxel is a chemical cousin of Taxotere (the current standard of care) and it is designed to evade the mechanism that cancer cells use to resist Taxotere, so we can assume that initially it would be [...]
OncoGenex Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (OGXI) announced that it's experimental product, OGX-011, also known as custirsen sodium, received fast track designation from the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of progressive metastatic prostate cancer in combination with first-line docetaxel treatment (chemotherapy). OGXI had previously received this same designation for second-line docetaxel treatment with OGX-011 [...]
Dr. Guru Sonpavde, MD (Clinical Assistant Professor, Baylor College of Medicine) reported about an open label, phase II trial of sunitinib (Sunitinib, marketed as Sutent, and previously known as SU11248 is an oral, small-molecule, multi-targeted receptor tyrosine kinase (RTK) inhibitor that was approved by the FDA for the treatment of renal cell carcinoma (RCC) and [...]
Once we have failed docetaxel therapy (chemo therapy) we have very few options available to control advanced prostate cancer. There is a recnt report about a clinical trial using a new potential drug, Patupilone. Patupilone has shown some evidence that it exhibits a limited positive effect in the pre-clinical setting in taxane resistant models of [...]
Men with metastatic hormone-refractory prostate cancer (mHRPC) who become docetaxel-refractory (no longer responsive to docetaxel therapy have no approved second line chemotherapy available. One could say that they have reached the proverbial brick wall. Where to go and what to do is not at all clear. Most of us do not want to just roll [...]
I was recently reviewing current clinical trials and came across this one for men who have failed chemotherapy, what many of us view as the final treatment for advanced prostate cancer. It provides a potential opportunity to combine two different therapy agents (one old, mitoxantrone; one relatively new, ixabepilone). Both of these chemicals are known [...]
What do advanced prostate cancer survivors do once we fail chemotherapy? At this time there are no FDA approved next steps other than to take some time off and pray that restarting chemotherapy will again help us. To put in another way, we wait to die. There is a huge need to find additional strategies [...]
What is left for us once we become resistant to docetaxel (DOC) plus prednisone, which is the last FDA approved, standard of care treatment available for advanced hormone refractory prostate cancer? There has been some studies that indicate after a “vacation period” similar to what many of us do with a first line hormone blockade, [...]
