Tag Archives: cancer research

November 28, 2019 · 10:00 am

Thanksgiving for an oncologist


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First, I want to thank those readers who generously helped me reach my goal of fundraising for the annual Movember effort to increase awareness and support research into prostate cancer and men’s health. If you are so inclined and want to make a last minute contribution, you may do so here: https://mobro.co/michaelglode?mc=1 My itchy, scraggly moustache is destined to come off tomorrow!

Second, it has been an incredible journey since my internship to watch the evolution of our understanding of cancer. In 1972, when my mother called to tell me (a young medical intern) she “had a little lump in her breast” – it turned out to be not-so-little, and she fought the disease for another 4 years before succumbing – we had little we could do other than surgery and in some cases radiation. Even adjuvant chemotherapy (the CMF treatment) had not been published yet. During the next decade, remarkable strides were made in finding new drugs, most notably cisplatin, that allowed cures of previously lethal diseases – especially testis cancer.

Then, while on sabbatical in Helsinki in 1986, I found an article to present at our journal club that I thought would revolutionize medicine. The PCR reaction opened the door to rapid DNA sequencing. When I returned to my lab in Denver, my PhD colleague, Ian Maxwell had already started to use the technique with his own jury-rigged thermal cycler, but it would be 3 or 4 more years until a medical student in his/her 3rd year clinical rotation would be able to tell me what PCR stood for. Recognizing there would be a generation of physicians who “missed out” on what would be the revolution, I was able to help start a catch-up course in Aspen, Molecular Biology in Clinical Oncology, that is still ongoing. As a “fly on the wall” I was able to listen to the world leaders in molecular oncology (including this year’s Nobel Prize winner, Bill Kaelin) describe their research that unlocked the mysteries of how cancer works. Fly-fishing with some of them on the Frying Pan was a bonus to be cherished!

As the cancer story unfolded, I was able to participate in many clinical trials, bringing new treatments that emerged to my patients. Thanks to the brilliant writing of Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of “The Emperor of all Maladies“, it became possible for my patients to begin to understand the nagging question, “how did this happen to me?” And now, this week, a brilliant article summarizing all we know about the genes and mutations that cause cancer has appeared in the New England Journal. I invite you to read that (it’s free online) if you want to join me in peering over the horizon to the future of cancer medicine. It is both overwhelming and humbling.

The privilege of living through the last half of the 20th century and into the 21st is one of the most amazing journeys one could ask of a human lifetime. As I ponder it, looking out on the snow I will get to ski on next week and enjoying my grandchildren and family, I am truly thankful to have been here. Happy Thanksgiving to all!

 

 

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November 11, 2019 · 8:15 am

Immuno-Fighting Cancer Like Wildfires


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I live in what is now known as the urban wildland interface west of Denver, the kind of area prone to the devastating fires that have been scorching California. Our firewise community efforts have taught us a lot about how a single windblown ember from miles away can destroy your house, and many of us have done a lot of mitigation. But, if the “big one” comes, our best hope is to grab the family albums and head down the hill.

Cancer can be very similar. If someone walks in with widespread disease, unless it is one of the highly treatable ones like testis cancer, flying over the patient with flame retardant (chemotherapy) may delay things for a while, but often the home is lost. The earliest realization of how to do better may have come from breast cancer. William Halstead realized in 1894 that putting out the fire effectively might include getting the surrounding “embers” (lymph nodes) at the time of removing the primary breast tumor (campfire in this analogy). A century later, it had become clear that in many instances the embers had spread too far for more radical surgical approaches, but that in some cases the embers could be extinguished (adjuvant chemotherapy) before the fire got out of control.

But what if the fire could be self-extinguishing? What if there was a boy scout at the campfire with a fire extinguisher? Better yet, what if you had smoke jumpers who could parachute in and help the boy by putting out the small fires elsewhere started by the embers? Immunotherapy offers just such hope. In the 1980’s we learned that giving high dose IL-2 to some patients with particularly sensitive tumors (kidney, melanoma) could produce cures in some cases. I liken this to sending in a group of non-specialist firemen/women in huge numbers to fight the forest fire doing the best they can.

Sending these individuals to more specialized training resulted in Provenge (sipuleucel-T), the first “vaccine” approved for treating any cancer, prostate being the target, and I was fortunate to participate in some of the first trials of this approach. But what was needed was both more effective equipment (in this case the PD-1 inhibitors that can “extinguish” the cancer’s ability to turn off the immune response) and more highly trained firefighters (potentially think of CAR-T cells) who have advanced skills, graduate degrees from a university, and can be deployed to go in search of the embers.

Now to torture this analogy just a bit further, let’s imagine that rather than sending the firefighters to universities for advanced generalized training, we could send them to CIA camps where they would receive the most specialized training possible right at the site where the fire started. In cancer, this may be the idea of using cryotherapy or irreversible electroporation to kill the local tumor, then injecting some cocktail of immune stimulatory molecules that enhance the body’s ability to create very effective T-cells that can go out as smoke jumpers looking for the embers (metastases), without the need for the university training outside the body (Sip-T or CAR-T).

Screen Shot 2019-11-11 at 8.13.35 AM

Already there are clinical trials underway with this technique that show promise. Gary Onik has demonstrated some remarkable responses in metastatic prostate cancer patients. Diwakar Davar just presented similarly exciting data in high risk melanoma patients who received intratumoral CMP-001 and systemic nivolumab before resection of the primary tumors. 62% of the patients had no tumor left in their surgical specimens! So  the cancer/firefighters are out there and although there will always be wildfires we simply can’t extinguish, the prospects for controlling them before or soon after they have spread have never looked better.

 

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October 5, 2019 · 12:20 pm

[How to] Choose Your Own Adventure


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Back when Al Gore and I invented the internet (just kidding…but it does seem like a long time ago – before twitter, instagram, and all the rest), I had the privilege of helping my professional society create its first website, ASCO Online. As part of that effort, I wrote an introductory article to assist my colleagues in understanding what I felt lay in the future. In addition to trying to explain how browsers and the internet worked (as an amateur early adopter), I stated, “Oncologists will increasingly act as information guides rather than information resources for patients and their families with cancer.”

Herein, I will attempt to make that easier for you if you have a personal interest in prostate cancer. There are now more than 103 million “hits” in a google search for “prostate cancer”. Therefore, first understand your condition. If you are thinking about screening, put that in your search term, or read this article I selected for you.

Next, be familiar with the myriad of terms that have evolved to describe different situations (“states”, “stages”, “conditions” etc.) to describe the disease. “Localized” means you have prostate cancer that is felt to be (or even proven to be after surgery) confined to the prostate. If localized, is it high risk, intermediate risk, or low risk? Your physician should be able to help you understand this based on the Gleason score, pathology findings, and PSA, but there are now multiple molecular tests that can be done to help further characterize what has been found. There is an excellent article to help you understand these here. If you haven’t had surgery or radiation, and are just deciding what to do, some of these tests can be done on your biopsy. I once wrote a blog about the challenging decision of choosing a method of primary treatment that is still relevant here.

However to be really up to date, you may wish to look at the research going on for any of the more advanced prostate cancer conditions. For this, you should become familiar with and use the NIH website, Clinicaltrials.gov. To help you with this, I have done some preliminary searches for different conditions, but recognize that the terms you enter change what you see, so regard this as just a start. Pick your condition, and click on it and you will find some trials that are ongoing (I preselected “recruiting”) for some common situations. If you don’t see your situation, play with the search terms yourself.

High risk after surgery based on pathology
Rising PSA (biochemical failure) after surgery or radiation
Known metastatic disease (spread to bones or nodes on scans) never previously treated
Rising PSA or new metastases on scans while on hormone therapy

Now, taking the last example which gave links to 160 studies, you can narrow the search results by using the pull down menu on the search screen, starting with country. Note that limiting to the U.S. drops the available trials from 160 to 93. Adding the state, Colorado, drops it to 14 studies, etc. Maybe you have a relative in a certain city or state you could visit if a trial fits your situation. If you would like to look only at immunotherapy trials, try entering the term, “immunotherapy”.

Next, let’s go further into one trial. Let’s say we are interested in the NIH immunotherapy trial being conducted at the NCI. If you scroll down, you can see what will be involved:

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Next, since the devil is in the details, you need to know if you are eligible for this trial. Continue to scroll down to the Eligibility Criteria section. Here you find what clinical conditions you MUST have (Inclusion Criteria) or MUST NOT have (Exclusion Criteria).

At this point, you should understand how it would be almost impossible for your physician to stay up on all of the trials. YOU are now the “information guide” and if you are interested in whether a certain trial (or even an approach you have found that might be something you could do outside of a trial) could be useful in your case, you should make an appointment to speak with your doctor about the trial/approach. Recognize that this will probably take more time than your “usual visit” and notify the clinic you will want extra time to discuss this. Print out the relative parts of the trial so you can show it to her/him, and ideally have your meeting in an exam room with an internet-connected computer so you can search through details together. If there are questions, each trial has the phone number for a contact person (typically a research nurse), and since your physician may be able to answer questions you would have trouble finding in your record, this phone call is best made together from the exam room.

In our fast-moving, internet-enabled era of medicine, this is how I think medicine should be practiced. The shared burden of “keeping up” means the patient has to do his (no women have prostate cancer) or her (if you are a supportive spouse or similar) own research, help the doctor, and work on approaches as a team. Being respectful of the time involved is critical, but it CAN work. And it is much more rewarding than keeping up with tweet storms!! And if this is “not for you”, find a grandchild and choose some different adventures here. (disclaimer: I have never done this, but looks like it could be fun)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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April 9, 2019 · 9:38 pm

What we see and what YOU get.


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Will Rogers is said to have stated, “When the Oakies left Oklahoma and moved to California, it raised the IQ of both states.” This story has given rise to the concept of the “Will Rogers phenomenon” in medicine that is very well explained in this essay. Basically, it provides a cautionary message when evaluating new therapies in cancer medicine, because if a new study has taken advantage of newer diagnostic techniques to eliminate some of the patients with higher risk (say those with metastases), then it could easily be that an improved result is not from the new therapy, but from the ability to throw out the higher risk patients from a study cohort.

We are certainly at risk of this now in prostate cancer. In the last 5-10 years, a number of more sensitive scans have been introduced that can reveal metastatic deposits previously missed by standard technetium-99m bone scans or CT scans. Most of these rely on the technology known as PET (positron emission tomography) scanning. The first clinical PET scans mostly utilized glucose to which a positron emitter, Fluorine-18, was attached. For bone metastases, it is easy to see how much more sensitive F-18 scans are as shown in this image: (Same patient – A. “Regular” Tc-99m bone scan  B. NaF-18 PET scan)

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Suppose you have a new treatment that is for patients “with 10 or fewer” bone metastases. If you are comparing the new treatment with one that was used in the past, and you now use the PET scan (on the right), this patient would not be eligible, whereas in the past (old scanning technique) he would have been. He clearly has a higher tumor burden than 10 metastases. Hence, he is now eliminated from the new study, and therefore the new study will automatically look better in terms of outcome than previous treatments. This is called “stage migration” or the “Will Rogers phenomenon”.

For “soft tissue” metastases (lymph nodes, liver, lung, etc.) the regular Fluorodeoxyglucose FDG-PET scans were approved decades ago for lung cancer, colon cancer, lymphomas and breast cancer but they never worked well for prostate cancer. A simplistic explanation may have to do with the different metabolism of prostate cancer which tends to utilize lipid rather than glucose for energy. (see our study here). Therefore researchers looked for other metabolites that would light up prostate cancer. Acetate and choline could be labelled with Carbon-11 and worked well. However, C-11 has a half life of only 20 minutes, so making the label in a cyclotron had to be done essentially in the room next door to the scanner and injected immediately into the patient. Another metabolite taken up by prostate cancer, an artificial amino acid (fluciclovine), could be labeled with F-18, worked well and has now been approved, called the Axumin scan.  Potentially even better will be the PSMA scan, now in research mode.

The net result of these new scans is to allow physicians to answer the frequent question patients ask, “Where is the PSA coming from?” The problem then becomes the title of this essay – What we see and what You get. There are numerous scenarios. For example, a patient who comes in with a very aggressive Gleason 9 cancer and a PSA of 12.3. Should we go immediately to a routine bone and CT scan, or just order an Axumin scan? And if we find 2 positive spots, one in a rib and the other in a lymph node, does that mean the patient can’t be cured?? Five years ago, we would have never known about the metastases and we would have operated or used radiation therapy in a curative attempt. Screen Shot 2019-04-09 at 9.56.43 PMWhat about the patient with a rising PSA 5 years after he had surgery. We do a PSMA scan and find a solitary node near the left iliac artery. Should we irradiate the node? What about operating and removing it – remember, it may not look any different from all the other nodes to the surgeon. Which one should he/she take out? And what is accomplished by these efforts? Should the PSA go down (yes if that’s the only metastasis) and what to do if it doesn’t go down. Are we playing “whack a node”? How many times do we go after spots that keep showing up, versus starting some sort of hormone therapy?

There is an excellent article addressing some of these questions written by my good friend Chris Sweeney and colleagues that you can read here. A summary quote from their article states, “Given the current limited understanding of how reliable these scans are in predicting the need for appropriate management change, data-driven guidelines and standardized consensus approaches are more critical than ever.” A review of some of the early attempts to treat a small number of metastases (called oligometastatic disease) has just appeared here. One example of a paper reporting interesting results is summarized as follows: “Of the retrospective reports, the largest includes 119 treatment‐naive patients who had ≤3 sites of oligorecurrence and received SBRT to all involved sites, with 92 of 119 (77%) undergoing pretreatment choline PET. The 3‐year distant PFS [progression free survival] rate of 31% and the 3‐year OS rate of 95% are favorable and suggest a subset of patients likely benefitted from aggressive local therapy; however, conclusions from these data are limited in the absence of a comparative control arm.”

Maybe we simply have to refer back to another quote from Will Rogers, “America is a nation that conceives many odd inventions for getting somewhere but it can think of nothing to do once it gets there.” Stay tuned…

 

 

 

 

 

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March 9, 2019 · 10:56 am

Black holes and genetic laws


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I just finished reading Stephen Hawking’s last book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, which I found more accessible than A Brief History of Time, written more than 30 years ago. Hawking’s abilities to explain the very (for me) abstract concepts of how no information can flow out of black holes and that the amount in there is somehow directly related to the cross sectional area of the hole was satisfying. As a very math challenged individual, I’m also a fan of Heisenberg and the perplexing issue that in the quantum/wave world of particle physics, you just can’t be certain about position and momentum. Yet, there are certain laws, like the speed of light, that are never violated, at least in the universe we live in.

So what does this have to do with genetics and prostate (or other) cancers? Here is a law: A always pairs with T, and C always pairs with G. In our biologic universe, without this law, no life as we know it could exist (prions may be an exception, but that gets too far into the definition of “life”). Yet, just as with the uncertainty of Heisenberg, the base pairing in DNA/RNA is not completely inviolable. Mistakes are made…and this can result in cancer. Cancer is a genetic disease and for anyone who hasn’t read it, I still recommend you avail yourself of the incredibly well written book, The Emperor of All Maladies. In the short time since that book was written, the explosion in our understanding of how genetic errors and cancer are related has been difficult to keep up with. The Cancer Genome Atlas (clever name, eh?) is but one example, and its use by scientists skilled in math (ugh) continues to help classify cancers based on how their mutations drive them rather than just how they look under the microscope or which organ they started in. Here is the math and the results one such analysis has on predicting survival for stomach cancer:

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As you can see, the prognosis and potentially the treatment for one subtype of “stomach cancer” might be very different for one patient than for another. Bringing this technology to prostate cancer, we already know the mutational landscape is vast. For example, this article looked at 1,013 different prostate cancers and found 97 significantly mutated genes, including 70 not previously recognized, and many present in <3% of cases. There is hidden good news in this story, in that the same mutational uncertainties that can give rise to cancer (breaking the law of AT-CG) also allows our immune systems to react to the novel mutated proteins that cancers now display. For an interview from this week’s NEJM on gene editing, click here.

Keeping up with this world of laws, broken laws, and “black holes” will be a remarkable challenge for patients and oncologists alike. My final recommendation for reading about this is a terrific article you can find here by George Sledge, one of the outstanding leaders in our field. He notes that even the most skilled oncologist, paired with the smartest of patients, will be unable to keep up. But remember this, you can’t go faster than the speed of light. That’s the law!

 

 

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February 18, 2019 · 3:02 pm

Tweet Storm from ASCO GU


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The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) along with other professional societies sponsors an annual symposium focused on GU cancers, with a day and a half devoted to prostate cancer. You can view all of the abstracts on screening, detection, and management of localized disease here. If you have an area of specific interest (for example, the use of MRI in detection) you can use the search function on your browser to find articles of interest. On the mac, it is “command+f” keys for both safari and chrome. You then type “MRI” into the box and use “command+g” to scroll through all of the abstracts. You come up with very interesting new information like an abstract on page 108, “MRI targeted biopsy dramatically increases detection of clinically significant prostate cancer while reducing the risk of indolent cancer detection.”

If your interest is more on the newest studies for advanced prostate cancer, you can go here, and do the same thing. What you will find, of course, is that the avalanche of information is pretty hard to digest. When we started ASCO OnLine in the early 90’s, the technology was limited, but now it overwhelms. We are left to hope that the experts who select the most important abstracts to be presented will have done a good job, but that presumes they know our individual interests, which of course they can’t. When tweeting became available, I decided I was too old. I did sign up for a handle, @ascotwit, that I used in a couple of meetings but in general, I haven’t found twitter to be very helpful, even though some of my younger colleagues tried to help me and we even wrote an an article about it. (…I certainly don’t think it is a good way to run a country…but I digress).

So to you, my loyal followers, and with no attempt to correct spelling (why should I if the leader of the free world doesn’t do it?), here are the tweets from the oral abstract presentations that I would have sent out if I was a twitter user:

Ipi + novolumab – “checkmate 650) therapy duration  only 2.1 or 1.4 months. Only 1/3 reached maintenance phase with ~1/2 of patients dropping out for toxicity. compared to patients in melanoma trial getting about 4 doses.“if you can’t get the drug in, you can’t see a response” 25% of patients had a response in cohort 1. They tend to respond early The subsets are those who had PD-1 positivity or high tumor mutation burden.

  • Scher assay. Getting to CTC 0 was useful in predicting better survival and was better than looking at a drop of 50% in PSA. The development of a show term outcome marker remains elusive. 46% of the patients who lived 13 weeks were not included because of not enough CTC’s
  • #140 ARAMIS study – efficacy and safety of darolutamide in nmcrpc.  Different structure than end and app and does not cross blood/brain barrier. men with no mets and psa dt <10 months. ADT + placebo vs dark. met free survival 18 months vs 40 months . overall survival 83% vs 73% placebo at 36 months. also improved time to pain, time to skeletal, time to cytotoxic chemo. Tolerance was excellent with no difference in AE rates. Fatigue 15.8% vs 11.4% (see nejm this week)
  • Final analysis of Phase III Latitude study. High risk met castrate naive pca newly diagnosed
    • High risk gleason >/= 8
    • Abi vs placebo + ADT. 
    • Final analysis showed hazard ratio of 0.66. OS 36.5 months vs 53.3 months. Time to pain progression was much longer (see slide). High volume patients clearly benefited most
  • #687 ARCHES trial ADT +/- Enz
    • included both low and high volume CHAARTED criteria, as well as could have had prior docetaxel or not. 2/3 had gleason 8-10; 18% had prior doce in the hormone sensitive setting
    • Primary endpoint was rPFS or death. secondary: time to spa progression, new rx, spa undetectable rate objective response rate
    • rPFS HR =0.39 across all subgroups including those who had previous doce Time to spa progression was 91% at 12 mo vs 63%. 68% got 0 psa vs 18%. 
    • Fatigue and hot flashes were worse but mostly grade 1/2. 93% of patients still alive. at 14.4 months
    • DISCUSSION
    • Is M0 crpc really important? New imaging techniques – does it even exist??. Inflection point of doubling time <6mo is important predictor (matt smith curve). Cost: for Enz 220k/year of life saved. PFS2 is the time to progression or death on the theft therapy. The Latitude trial suggests delay in time to next endpoint.  
    • Cost for abi/p is still 10k/mo but generic is now approved
    • discussion of which one to use. not strictly comparable patient populations. need cost effectiveness randomized trial?
  • # 2 Choline scan can replace conventional imaging, but has poor negative predictive value – identifies mets earlier but no way to say that the earlier management changes makes any difference.
  • #144 – small. initiation of apalutamide early may result in prolonged effect looking at psa2 See screen shot. Earlier treatment for non-metastatic disease is likely better than waiting for mets. There are 3 potential agents (enz, apa, dur). Delaying time to symptoms is also very important. Suggests that anything you add later still does not make up for starting early.
  • #365 – yu. Pembro + olaparib in doce pretreated patients with mCRPC. Needed disease progression after doce, randomized to cohort A Pembro + olap 68% had measurable disease. 41% with visceral disease. None of the patients had DDR mutations by biopsy or circ. dna. 12% response rate. 39% had some measurable disease response. they will expand from 42 to 100 patients. Continue randomizing to other cohorts.
  • #146 Chen Genetic drivers of poor prognosis and enz resistance in mcrpc. 86% patients had ar gain. Complete biallelic loss of RB1 median OS 14.1 months vs 42 months (not looked at in association with enz resistance -they didn’t look). WNT btea catenin pathway was highest abn asso with resistance. CTNNB1 mutation found only in enz resistant patients and was also associated with  poor prognosis similar to the RB1 
  • #147 – compared 3 arms. MDT upfront with SBRT. vs abi/ADT up front vs ADT up front. Assumed 10 years. Markov model. Looked at  cost effectiveness. ADT upfront low cost/low effective. Abi/ADT is not cost effective compared to MDT. Willingness to pay threshold of $100,000/qaly. Costs would need to decline by 90% to be the dominant strategy. MDT is a cost effective treatment. Did not look at MDT + upfront ADT with or without abi. Model assumed 1-3 extracranial metastases using data from STOMP and M1 Stampede.
  • #148 Doce +/- enz CHEIRON study. N=246. Combo arm more toxic with neutropenia. disease control 89% combo vs 73%. But no difference in overall survival but most patients did go on to receive 2nd gen adt.

Reading through them, with misspellings, poor wording, and probably containing some real errors (don’t rely on this “tweet” – go to the abstract to verify anything above) I realize how challenging it is to keep up these days. My best suggestion to ALL cancer patients is that they find a physician who is focused on their particular disease if at all possible. I fear the era of being a general medical oncologist is over (and certainly over for a 71-year-old like me). While any of us could use the NCCN guidelines (or other practice guidelines from organizations like ASCO or AUA) to care for patients, there is little that can replace the actual experience one gains by participating in the development of new agents that are rapidly coming into clinical use these days. If you can think of a solution, don’t tweet to me because I have no idea how to use it and don’t “follow” many people. However, I welcome your comments on this old fashioned blog, and can even throw in an emoji (of sorts):   😉  Have a great February and remember, the prostate is our only heart shaped organ.

Screen Shot 2019-02-18 at 2.51.27 PM

 

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November 1, 2018 · 12:45 am

It’s MO time – please help!


To view this post on my blog site, sign up for future posts, and read more info relevant to prostate cancer, please click here. Donate to my moustache here. Even better, grow your own and get your friends to help out here. The more of us who join in, the wider the recognition of men’s health issues.

In my career fighting for the cure of prostate cancer, two organizations (besides the National Cancer Institute) have been outstanding partners. Movember was started by a couple of friends in a bar in Australia. This became the answer to a long standing jealousy of mine for something as popular and effective as the Susan G. Koman Foundation and Race for the Cure. I often refer to our prostate cancer journey when I lecture by noting how we “crawl for the cure” while our sisters are racing. In 2016, the NCI budget for breast cancer research was $519.9 million, more than twice as much as that for prostate cancer at $241 million. This, in spite of the fact that prostate cancer deaths this year are 3/4 as common (29,430) as breast cancer deaths (40,920). It’s not a contest really, since all cancer research is moving the field forward rapidly, but Movember has been incredibly helpful in sponsoring research and advocating for us.

The other organization, Prostate Cancer Foundation, shows how much a single individual with great connections and personal motivation can do. Michael Milken deserves enormous credit for his vision and leadership. I personally benefited from grants given out by the foundation, and even more from their amazing annual meeting that draws together prostate cancer researchers from around the world to share data and ideas. Dr. Howard Soule is a key factor in PCF’s incredible success and his name should be as well known as Susan G. Koman in my view.

I hope you will join with all of us in fighting for the cure in prostate cancer. Grow one, or support someone who is growing, and tell your friends. The progress and future has never been brighter, and our hairy upper lips should show it!

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