For our prostate cancer followers, patients & caregivers, PCRI announced yesterday that its mid-year one-day conference on Saturday, March 28 will now be held as a virtual gathering with a live FREE stream …. all you need do is register here.
The conference features as always the dynamic variety duo, Drs. Mark Moyad and Mark Scholz. They will be joined by 3 excellent speakers:
GU Medical Oncologists, Dr. Evan YU from Seatle Cancer Alliance/ University of Washington Med School
Radiation Oncologist, Dr. Jeffrey Demanes from UCLA
Genomic specialist, Dr. Joannne Wiedhaas, UCLA
Each speaker will be followed by Q&A fielding your written questions that can be submitted ahead of time. And it will conclude with 90′ of Q&A with Moyad & Scholtz.
This is a terrific opportunity for you to ask the experts all those questions your own medical team has not answered completely and/or we are not fielding in one of our NINE, yes 9!, monthly VIRTUAL PC support groups. AND this crew will respond to personal situations and provide somewhat filtered medical advice that we cannot do.
That should cover it all, but just in case not, here again is the PCRI Conference website:
Repeat PSMA scans; Dr. Oh at Mount Sinai; Radiation and inflammation; using a physiatrist; medical marijuana dosage, interactions and side effects; UsTOO Chicago Meeting recording https://ustoo.org/PathwaysChicago2019 ; intermediate vs continuous hormone therapy; Testosterone recovery on IHT; AR V7 responses from Dr. Antonarakis; urinary frequency and drug discussion; sleeping pills; SBRT for spot radiation; bad side effects from apalutamide; distinguishing adjuvant hormone treatment from metastatic HT treatment; LHRH + abiraterone adjuvant hormone therapy
Advisory Board member, Allen Edel authors an exceptional blog, Prostate Cancer News, Reviews & Views on various ‘technical’ prostate cancer matters – that’s just one of the reasons we are proud to have him on our Advisory Board. You’ll find the blog here where you can sign up for new posts … as of course you can with AnCan just to the right!
Allen’s latest post is an excellent treatise on PSMA, based on reviewing several studies. He makes a number of interesting points to bear in mind when considering PSMA based protocols, amongst them:
consider getting both a PSMA and FDG basedPET/ CT scan before opting for radionuclide treatment
PSMA is very heterogeneous i.e. it can be expressed differently certainly within the same man and maybe even amongst cells in the same tumor
PARP-I’s can promote the potency of PSMA based treatments
Once again, AnCan expresses deep gratitude to Allen for keeping us well informed on important aspects of treatment that many medical practitioners, never mind advocates and patients, would otherwise miss.
This interesting study coming from the renowned lab of Johann de Bono at the Institute for Cancer Research in the U.K. should help us understand why some patients may respond well to the promising PSMA-based therapeutics, like Lutetium 177-PSMA, and others may not.
Through analysis of prostate cancer samples, the authors report that the presence of prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) is extremely variable both within one patient and between different patients. This may limit the usefulness of PSMA scans and PSMA-targeted therapies. They show for the first time that prostate cancers with defective DNA repair (e.g., BRCA, ATM mutations) produce more PSMA and so may respond better to PSMA-targeting treatments. The variability in PSMA production by prostate cancer cells was seen in both castrate sensitive and castrate resistant tumors.
Two pieces of research crossed my desk in the past couple of weeks regarding advanced PCa scanning. The first is a short, easy to read review of two studies by our friend Dr. Fabio Almeida in Phoenix, Az that summarizes what we often discuss in our virtual groups ….. that the Gallium 68 PSMA scan is roughly speaking twice as effective as the Axumin scan; and that both are much more effective at higher PSA’s. The likelihood of detecting cancer at a recurrent PSA of 1.00 is about double the rate at less than 0.5. Many thanks to the Silicon Valley UsTOO Advanced PCa group for circulating this and to Peter Kafka for forwarding to me.
The second piece of information to highlight comes from a recent PCI post regarding the even better scanning technique 18F-DCFPyl currently being trialed by NIH in Bethesda, MD and elsewhere. Preliminary results of the CONDOR trial suggest that 48 of 55 men in total changed their disease management plans as a result of the scanning result. This is a small sample, and there are an additional 145 men admitted to this trial whose results have not yet been included.
