How Has Advanced Prostate Cancer Treatment Evolved?

How Has Advanced Prostate Cancer Treatment Evolved? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

How has the advanced prostate cancer research landscape evolved? Expert Dr. Rana McKay discusses how prostate cancer treatment options have expanded and how PSMA PET imaging has revolutionized detection.

Dr. Rana McKay is an associate clinical professor of medicine at Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego Health. Learn more about Dr. McKay.

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Transcript:

Katherine:

Dr. McKay, I’d like to have you tell us how the landscape of advanced prostate cancer has changed over your career.  

Dr. McKay:

Oh, my goodness. It has absolutely rapidly evolved over the last decade. I think when I was just starting my career, it was right around the time where abiraterone (Zytiga) and enzalutamide (Xtandi) were being heavily tested and just getting approved and entering into the clinic.

And as we think about all of the evolution that’s happened since that time, we now have multiple androgen receptor pathway inhibitors in the clinic. We have radioligand therapies in the clinic, radium-223. The first radioligand therapy across any solid tumor malignancy to improve overall survival and on the heels of that, most recently, lutetium PSMA, which is a targeted radioligand therapy.

There are several different kinds of chemotherapies, and I think two more diagnostics have evolved. We are now integrating molecular profiling across multiple areas in the disease natural history and actually have several FDA-approved treatments based off of results of molecular profiling, whether that be germline hereditary testing or just tumor testing like, PARP inhibitors and immunotherapy.

And then, additionally, to kind of continue on that same thought of our diagnostics changing is one of the greatest disruptors in our treatment of prostate cancer has been the introduction of PSMA PET imaging that has really revolutionized our ability to be able to detect disease at lower levels of PSA.   

And that’s opened up options for focal therapy, radiation therapy, and other sorts of strategies. So, it’s really been just remarkable, all of the different advances that have occurred in prostate cancer over the last decade.