Is anyone here on Bipolar Androgen-based Therapy, BAT?

A friend of mine now has castrate-resistant metastatic prostate cancer. He had surgery in 2010, did no follow up testing whatsoever until 2014 when he had a fracture. Investigation showed it was due to a bone-met-induced local weakening; a PSA check was over 400 at that time.

He's been on Lupron since 2014, and began Zytiga sometime since. He's not big on details. His PSA has come down a lot, but his most recent test showed it has gone up from 14 to 22, and they've decided to do something more now. It seems he has failed Zytiga with this increase.

He told me he's going to do Bipolar Androgen Therapy. It sounds like it's some kind of trial, but he wasn't sure. He said he will be randomized into one of two arms, "start now" or "start later". (He was very unclear on just what was planned. He's still reeling from the PSA increase news unfortunately, and rather emotionally fragile). I don't quite understand the trial aspect, because what "later" would that be? He's already on ADT, so the only change would be to add testosterone. Maybe it involves something else with the testosterone?

We didn't have long to talk last night, so I hope to find more details when I see him again. He's having scans next Tuesday, so maybe it's to see if he how many mets are active, and if it's 10 or less to meet some of the trial criteria I've seen.

We discussed it on this link last September. Has anything more developed in the last 6 months? My friend is another reminder that there are variants of this disease are indeed worse than the treatments.

NJ Jon, if you're still hanging around here, how are you doing? It seemed in September that you were pretty satisfied with the therapy, at least at that time.

Thanks, Allen. I'll forward those links to him. Your blogs help to make the studies more understandable for lay people.

[Edit: This is amusing. I looked up the TRANSFORMER trial. For some reason they used some kind of boilerplate template for a description. It's pretty unlikely it would actually apply to women of childbearing age!
A woman of childbearing potential is eligible if she has:
A negative serum pregnancy test at Screening and a negative serum pregnancy test at Baseline.
Agreed to undertake monthly serum pregnancy tests during the study and up to 30 days after study drug discontinuation.
Agreed to use one of the methods of contraception / follow the contraception scheme described in the protocol from Screening up to at least 30 days after study treatment discontinuation.]

[Edit 2: This is a much better description of the study and its design]