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 [...]
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 [...]
An uncommon, but very aggressive form of prostate cancer is known as Neuroendocrine prostate cancer (NEPC). It is generally accepted that Circulating Tumor Cell (CTC) counts as measured by CellSearch (a method to catch and count these cells in the blood) are prognostic for most men with metastatic prostate cancer (mPC), but are not well [...]
Better prediction tools to predict treatment outcome in men with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) should significantly improve treatment outcomes. Without good predictive measures we often don't know when is the optimum time to stop a therapy and move to another. This means that we might maturely stop an effective treatment losing the effectiveness of [...]
At the 2013 European Cancer Congress in Amsterdam Dr. Howard Scher from Sloan Kettering Hospital reported that a panel of biomarkers could identify men with metastatic, castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) who were responding well or less well to treatment with Zytiga + prednisone (abiraterone + prednisone). Dr. Scher provided data in his presentation to support [...]
More on Sipuleucel-T (Provenge) from the 2013 The last two abstracts that I want to speak about that were presented at the conference that pertained to Provenge speak to its efficacy. The first looks at changes in circulating tumor cells (CTC) and the second to the onset of the use of opioid painkillers. Abstract #40 [...]
