Update to NCCN Prostate Cancer guidelines published March 6 ,2019

Thanks Jerry. Most of these updates indicate considerable standard of care treatment stability from year to year. It seems like we haven't really had much breakthrough or significant differences since the treatment explosion years that brought us Provenge, Xtandi and Zytiga.

Mattam, it seems these go in surges and the current wave is immunno and genetic therapeutics. The most recent, Keytruda, is not at all mainstream for PCa. I know of only three that have used and only one with any positive results. I haven’t heard what is next for PCa but to your point it seems we are stuck with basically ten year old, or more, theraputics. I had hoped for more by now.

It appears more of the cancer treatment research is focused on genetics and finding triggers that will personalize our body’s immune response to our individual cancer. These could be the real breakthroughs but who knows when. We saw the explosion of the monoclonal antibody drugs (name ending in ”mab”) but none have proved effective for PCa. They have been used to improve diagnostics with the PSMA based scans.

My son is a doctoral candidate at Cornel and his research project is with a rare childhood liver cancer and it is all about genetics of the cancer to find how the body can overcome it. A generation ago it would have been about finding a chemotherapeutic agent that will kill the cancer and not the host. My son worked on the end stage of the human genome mapping project several years ago and contends that it is the major breakthrough breakthrough project and that we have barely scratched the surface as to what can be done. But it all takes so much time.