THE "NEW" PROSTATE CANCER INFOLINK

We have recently learned that Movember conducted a major landscape analysis of unmet research needs in prostate cancer that started back in 2017 and ran through 2019 but just got published in 2020.

The full text of the resulting article by Kouspou et al. was published in Nature Reviews Urology on July 22. A number of key points need to be made in relation to this landscape analysis:

• The patient community was well represented in providing input to this document, as well as the prostate cancer research community.
• The analysis appears to have been thorough.
• Some of the recommendations made in this landscape analysis already appear to be outdated.

It is a little puzzling to your sitemaster that if the Landscape Analysis Committee met as long ago as December 2017 it should have taken the best part of 3 years to publish the final analysis and recommendations, but perhaps this became more complicated than one might immediately assume.

The analysis lists 17 areas of research need in total and three areas as having the highest level of priority of research need:

• Research need number 1: Establishing more sensitive and specific tests to improve low-risk disease screening and diagnosis
• Research need number 2: Developing indicators to better stratify low-risk prostate cancer in determining which men should go on active surveillance
• Research need number 15: Integration of companion diagnostics in randomized clinical trials to enable prediction of treatment response

Whether members of the patient community would necessarily agree with that set of prioritizations may be open to some question.

Filed under: Diagnosis, Living with Prostate Cancer, Management | Tagged: analysis, landscape, Movember, need, priority, research |