THE "NEW" PROSTATE CANCER INFOLINK

Early this morning, Progenics Pharmaceuticals announced completion of enrollment of patients in the Phase II/III OSPREY trial of a new PSMA-targeted PET/CT imaging agent for detection of prostate cancer.

For more details, please see this corporate media release. Full details about the OSPREY trial can also be found on line.

Basically, Progenics is developing a new type of fluorine-18-labeled, PSMA-linked imaging agent known as PyL™ or [sup>18</sup>F]DCFPyL. The injectable agent will — hopefully — get approved for use in the diagnosis and work-up of men with high-risk, recurrent, and/or advanced forms of prostate cancer to see if it can accurately identify the presence of small tumors that are not currently easy to identify by standard forms of bone scan, MRI, or CT scan. To that extent, it will be similar to the currently approved Axumin imaging agent.

Progenics hopes to have results available from the OSPREY trial before the end of 2018. That trial included 383 patients with localized high-risk, recurrent, and metastatic forms of prostate cancer. The company is also planning to initiate a second Phase III trial among patients with patients with biochemically recurrent prostate cancer.

A smaller trial at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center (the VANDAAM trial) will soon start to enroll 60 or so high-risk patients into a study investigating the use of this imaging agent in men with high Decipher scores at time of initial diagnosis.

The one problem with all of these agents at present is that access to such imaging methods can be difficult for many patients for either insurance reasons or because they simply don’t live near enough to a center with the necessary PET/CT technology.

Filed under: Diagnosis, Living with Prostate Cancer, Management, Risk | Tagged: imaging, OSPREY, Progenics, PSMA, PyL |