Comment: PARP inhibitors for advanced prostate cancer

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Published: 30 Sep 2019
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Dr Ignacio Duran - Hospital Universitario Virgen del Rocío, Sevilla, Spain

Dr Ignacio Duran comments on data from the PROfound trial during a press conference at the 2019 ESMO congress.

This was a trial evaluating the PARP inhibitor olaparib vs new hormonal agents in patients with metastatic, pre-treated prostate cancer whose cancer cells had faulty DNA repair genes.

Watch the press conference here.

Watch Prof Maha Hussain's interview with ecancer here.

Read more about the study here

I think the relevance of the work that Dr Hussain has presented right now, I think it’s double. You have to understand that not only this work has proved that olaparib, this drug, is superior to the control arm, it’s not only that. I think this study has demonstrated that now prostate cancer can be treated with a targeted therapy approach. Putting this in more simple words, not all prostate cancer patients have the same tumours and this is the first time we’ve been able to identify that we can more precisely characterise the molecular biology, the genetic background of these tumours, and that is going to determine how we treat them. So a double hit – superiority in terms of efficacy and has proved a new concept that in prostate cancer had not been proved before. So targeted medicine works also for prostate cancer.