The Oncologist Journal of the Society for Translational Oncology (STO) has published a video recording on prostate cancer that is well worth watching for those with an interest in this area.

At their Sept 8, 2011 CME symposium held in Belfast, a roundtable was held entitled “Prostate Cancer: Progress & Promise.”

Moderated by Bruce A. Chabner (Mass General/Harvard), the panelists were Joe O’Sullivan (Queen’s University, Belfast), Johann De Bono (The Institute for Cancer Research) and David Waugh (Queen’s University, Belfast).

Professor de Bono in the video comments that”

“with regards to our dream of eventually treating men with prostate cancer without castrating them, which must be our ultimate goal and curing them of cancer. I think we will have to focus on for example drugs targeting ERG or ERG signaling.”

Chabner then asks the good question of whether ERG is a druggable target?

To which De Bono replies that you can drug ERG by inhibiting PARP and references a paper by the Chinnaiyan group published in the May 2011 issue of Cancer Cell.

PARP inhibition represents an interesting area of prostate cancer research.

If you would like to know more, Sally Church, PhD has written about this on Pharma Strategy Blog.  See posts on “TMPRSS2: ERG may be a more useful marker than PSA in prostate cancer” and “Personalized Therapy for Prostate Cancer – is it possible?”

In the STO video, De Bono discusses why he would like to replace bone scans in prostate cancer with another imaging modality that more accurately reflects the activity of the disease. Future possibilities include use of diffusion weighted magnetic resonance imaging and novel PET tracers.

There’s also a good discussion about Alpharadin for those interested in some anecdotal commentary on experiences with it.

Another notable comment by De Bono is his belief that “taxanes work in prostate cancer primarily by targeting androgen receptor signaling.” Taxanes have typically been thought to target mitosis.

De Bono goes on to say that clinical trial data being submitted for publication shows that patients who are refractory to abiraterone, are also refractory to docetaxel when they progress on it.  The suggestion is that there may be cross resistance between abiraterone and taxanes with a subgroup of patients who just don’t do well on androgen receptor (AR) targeting drugs.  The reason for this isn’t yet clear.

A new phase 2 clinical trial is starting soon that will look at the sequencing of abiraterone and cabazitaxel.  One group will receive abiraterone followed by cabazitaxel, the other cabazitaxel followed by abiraterone.

The Belfast STO symposium was the second in a three part series. The next one will be held during ASCO GU in San Francisco next year.

Another potentially useful meeting in this area is the February 2012 AACR workshop on “Advances in Prostate Cancer Research” chaired by Arul Chinnaiyan & Charles Sawyers.

Prostate cancer remains an exciting therapeutic area to watch with tremendous progress and promise of late.

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