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 [...]
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 [...]
Today most doctors rely on their personal evaluation or objective response criteria (OR) of a man to know when docetaxel chemotherapy has stopped working. The earlier this determination can be accurately made the quicker an alternative treatment can e put into place. Personal evaluations without any validated tools are unreliable and never consistent among doctors. [...]
There is more evidence that the blood test used to count the number of cells circulating in the blood and shed from prostate tumors (circulating tumor cells or CTCs) can indicate whether a treatment is working or not working. A major new study showed that the number of these circulating tumor cells in the blood [...]
It isn’t here yet, but it very much is here! What am I talking about? Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are going to become a clear winner for us as the concept of using them finds its way into commercialization. Metastatic castration resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) is difficult to evaluate using our less than stellar conventional [...]