Good news about prostate cancer: three pieces of progress
Not all the news about prostate cancer is bad. For the fifth article in my 30-article series for Movember, 2026, I present the first of three examples of progress in treatment and diagnosis.
(I pledged to produce these articles, even though I am currently undergoing prostate cancer treatment, as part of a fundraising pledge to which you can donate here. Please consider doing so and sharing a link to this blog (CobbsBlog.com) on social media.)
Prostate cancer drugs
Prostate cancer is a large and growing challenge to men's health, as documented in this article, and that means there's plenty of financial incentive, as well as compassionate incentive, to find drugs that can help treat prostate cancer.
To get technical, GnRH stands for gonadotropin-releasing hormone receptor antagonists. Relugolix does not block testosterone itself. It blocks hormonal signals from the pituitary gland that tell the testicles to produce testosterone. Unfortunately, while it makes sense to starve prostate cancer cells of the testosterone they need to grow, testosterone is also essential to a healthy male body; that means the implications of going without testosterone for months at a time are quite serious, something I will get into in a separate post.
A promising new PCa drug
But I digress, the new drug I wanted to highlight comes from pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson. Last month the company announced promising results from an early clinical trial of an experimental drug with the snappy name of JNJ-6143. Like Relugolix, this drug is taken as a daily pill. But unlike conventional hormone treatments, which attempt to control prostate cancer by depriving it of testosterone, this drug is designed to interfere directly with proteins that cancer cells need to survive, triggering their destruction.
The results are striking: among patients receiving the selected dose, 77% experienced a reduction in PSA levels of at least 50%, and nearly half saw their PSA fall by 90% or more. Even more encouraging, among patients with tumours that could be measured on scans, 75% experienced significant tumour shrinkage or complete disappearance of the measurable tumours. These were men with advanced prostate cancer who had already undergone several other treatments, making the results particularly encouraging.
This trial was small and much larger studies are needed to establish whether the benefits last and whether patients actually live longer. Nevertheless, this is an exciting development, suggesting that researchers may be able to find new ways to attack prostate cancer beyond the familiar strategy of suppressing testosterone.
If, like me, you are familiar with having your testosterone suppressed, you know that avoiding this would be a big help. Unfortunately, JNJ-6143 is not yet an alternative to testosterone suppression. In fact, the Phase 2 trial requires patients to continue ADT. Right now the focus of the drug's developers is fighting metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer—cancer that continues growing despite very low testosterone levels.
Nevertheless, what I take from learning about this new drug is that, in the future, it is may be possible to defeat prostate cancer without chronic testosterone suppression.
Next up: an exciting development in "Refining existing treatments." That will be followed by progress in the genetics of prostate cancer which could help find men at risk earlier than current technology allows.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment