What Is the PROMISE Study for Prostate Cancer Patients?
What Is the PROMISE Study for Prostate Cancer Patients? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
Prostate cancer patients may have access to participate in prostate cancer studies. Dr. Heather Cheng from Seattle Cancer Care Alliance shares information about the PROMISE Study that she’s involved with and what the study examined in prostate cancer genetics.
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Transcript:
Dr. Heather Cheng:
The PROMISE Study is a study that I’m conducting in partnership with my colleague, Dr. Paller at the Johns Hopkins and other collaborators throughout the United States, and it’s a study to help men with prostate cancer understand their genetics. We know that there are many people who have prostate cancer who have genetic risks of prostate cancer, maybe they inherited a risk factor, but they don’t know about it, and this is important to know because now we have targeted or precision treatment options on additional toolboxes, treatments exciting treatments for those patients, but they may not be aware of it if they don’t know about their genetics. And so one is, it’s increasing the knowledge, and then also it may have important implications for the relative, so sometimes those genetic factors are shared and that information can also be life-saving. So the study is really easy, actually, patients who are interested or people that are interested who had a diagnosis of prostate cancer, go to the website, which is www.prostate cancer promise.org, and then they can read about the study and they can enroll on the web or by the Internet, and then they are mailed a saliva test or kit, and then they spit into the kit and then mail it back, and then they get a medical-grade genetic testing report back that test 30 genes that are associated with cancer risk.
So some of those are prostate cancer, but then men who have certain mutations that we’re particularly interested in will be invited for long-term more…more long-term follow-up in all patients who participate can get a newsletter where we sort of inform them about the newest, latest, greatest things and prostate cancer. And so I think it’s really exciting because it’s increasing the ability and access of patients to genetic testing, but then also leveraging our web-based information platforms, just like this one, is to advance education and make sure we’re getting all of that excitement and opportunities out to patients even if they live far away from some of the biggest cancer centers, we want to make sure all patients have access to that knowledge.