Progress and Promise in Prostate Cancer

20 June 2017

I write today not from the files of the Jimmy Buffet musical collection, nor from a Caribbean Margaritaville-esque cabana, as the reference might suggest (for the unfamiliar, I have been humming his song “Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude…for about 2 weeks now)  but rather as a dispatch on the latest development in clinical trials in prostate cancer.  The topic:  Data from the Latitude study that was presented at ASCO by Karim Fizazi and simultaneously published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

07 June 2017

It is becoming increasingly well known that about 25% of CRPC tumors harbor some form of a mutation in BRCA1, 2, ATM or other such genes. Colin Pritchard and others have done some really excellent work on this topic by giving us genomic snapshots of the disease (you can see me interview him in St Gallen on this topic here on UroToday: link).¹ The efficacy of Parp inhibitors in this setting is being tested in a number of trials at the moment. 

01 May 2017

I have been struck in the past few weeks by the number of patients in my practice who have advanced metastatic CRPC who were diagnosed more than 15 years ago and had, on their original biopsy specimen, ONLY a Gleason 6 pattern prostate carcinoma.

14 March 2017

Welcome to my blog on UroToday!  I am a genitourinary medical oncologist at the University of California – San Francisco and specialize in the management of advanced prostate cancer. I maintain a specific focus on androgen and androgen receptor (AR) interactions in the tumor as well as in the patient. The science of testosterone and prostate cancer have both exploded in the last decade, and one of my goals is to help navigate these findings through both a scientific and a patient oriented perspective. 

14 March 2017

I have spent the better part of the last 20 years thinking about testosterone and the androgen receptor (AR) and its effect on prostate cancer. I started by applying synthetic testosterone to cancer cells in the laboratory at the University of Wisconsin, progressed to studying the effect of retained androgen receptor signaling in human prostate tumors at Memorial Sloan Kettering and finally studied the clinical effects of abiraterone, apalutamide, ketoconazole and other drugs as therapies for prostate cancer here at UCSF. One of the best pieces of career advice that I ever got was a very simple: Follow the AR.

14 March 2017

In the last two weeks I’ve had one patient refuse ADT because of his history of depression, another who has been on ADT for 10 months asked me to refer him to a psychiatrist, and another, with CRPC who has been on ADT for 4 years, told me his depression is finally under control. This leaves a lot of issues to confront.