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 to abiraterone (Zytiga) and enzalutamide (Xtandi) (This issue is discussed in many other posts on this blog, additional information s available by searching AR-V7). Their work involved the development of a new blood-based assay to detect AR-V expression without the need for CTC isolation, which s expensive and time consuming.

The work involved the successful development of a whole-blood approach to assessing AR-V expression which offers higher sensitivity than the CTC-based approach. Their data from CRPC patients also confirms other findings of AR-Vs positivity and resistance to therapies targeting the AR ligand-binding domain.

Presented by Haitao Zhang, et al. at the American Urological Association (AUA) Annual Meeting – May 15 – 19, 2015 – New Orleans, LA USA

Joel T Nowak, M.A., M.S.W