Now that we have new treatments available to fight advanced, metastatic prostate cancer we need ways to decide on the best treatments given that many of the treatments occupy the same disease space. This is especially important with the soaring costs of many treatments as well as the need to not waste time by giving a treatment that will not work, thus delaying using a more effective treatment.
We know that not all men will get any benefit (respond) to all the available treatments, so how can we predetermine who will respond to a drug and who will not. Answering this type of question is as vital as our continuing the development of additional new treatments. In reality as we do develop additional treatments this issue becomes increasing more important.
In pursuit of trying to develop ways to pre-determine drug sensitivity, at the most recent American Association of Clinical Oncologists (ASCO) Annual meeting Dr. Emmanuel Antionarakis, MD, Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center in Baltimore formally presented data showing that a simple blood test maybe able to identify men who will not be responders to enzalutamide (Xtandi). He found that the presence of a splice va