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 [...]
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 [...]
We are in desperate need of validated biomarkers, which can serve as surrogates for survival. Currently, our doctors must make decisions about which drugs to use and how long to stay on these drugs without any scientific backup or consensus driven direction to their decisions. Our clinical trials for evaluating survival of potential new advanced [...]
In a recent publication it was suggested that radiographic progression-free survival (rPFS) in men with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) was highly consistent and highly associated with overall survival. This reproducible quantitative find could have implications for the interim measurement of treatment response in future studies, according to Dr. Michael J. Morris of Memorial Sloan [...]
In yesterday's post I wrote about the possibility of looking for the presence of the splice variant ARV7 to determine if you would be resistant to enzalutamide (Xtandi). Today I am going to expand on this issue and discuss an additional study that demonstrated that the presence of ARV7 in circulating tumor cells not only [...]
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 [...]
In our quest to understand our prostate cancer we have developed many “measures” of our disease aggressiveness and progression. Many of these measures are generally accepted has valid, but many have never been validated. One example is the prognostic nature of PSA Doubling Time (PSADT) in men with biochemically recurrent prostate cancer (BRPC or PSA [...]
Higher circulating tumor cell counts are associated with an increased risk of death. Men with metastatic castrate resistant prostate cancer don’t have a good biomarker to predict survival. According to a study published online ahead of print in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. by Amir Goldkorn, MD, and colleagues at the Keck School of Medicine of [...]
Sipuleucel-T (Provenge) has shown in clinical trials that it prolongs overall survival (OS) in asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic men with castrate resistant prostate cancer (CRPC). Unlike many other treatments for men with CRPC there are not any reliable biomarkers to show that it is working for any individual. There is also a lack of markers [...]
Satraplatin is an oral platinum drug that is believed to bind the DNA of the cancer cell, which then prevents the cancer from being able to reproduce. Satraplatin had been tested in a phase III trial in men with metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) who have failed chemotherapy with docetaxel. It failed because it did [...]
