I have talked a lot about our need to take the next step in clinical care, understanding the best sequencing of our drugs. Since we have a number of new drugs to treat advanced prostate cancer we now need to better understand which drugs should be used in which men as well as their proper sequencing.
To do this we need to understand the genetic differences that our cancers have from each other.
Cancer is a genetic disease and what we refer to, as prostate cancer is not one distinct disease, but it is many different diseases. To better sequence the drugs we also need to understand these genetic differences. We know that some drugs will work for certain genetic strains of prostate cancer while in other genetic strains it will not work.
Towards this end, results from a recent phase 2 trial that was published in The New England Journal of Medicine has shown that treatment with olaparib, a poly(adenosine disphosphate