Good news for men with a type of prostate cancer that has a notoriously low cure rate: In what may be a landmark development in the treatment of this potentially fatal disease, a third of patients in a preliminary clinical study "achieved pathologic complete response or near-complete response following neoadjuvant therapy with abiraterone (Zytiga) and leuprolide," according to a MedPage Today report on a telebrieging about the research prior to the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting.
The telebriefing moderator, Nicholas Vogelzang, MD, chair of ASCO's communication committee, said, "This is one of the first, if not the first, study to show that you can make prostate cancer in the prostate gland itself disappear in a reproducible number of patients." Vogelzang, who is also chair of genitourinary oncology for US Oncology, noted that further validation is necessary but nonetheless hailed the findings as promising.
During the telebriefing, Mary-Ellen Taplin of Harvard and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston added further good news by saying that the regimen resulted in a low rate of systemic toxicity.
