A Perspective from Portland, Oregon: Effective prostate cancer drug ...

The drug ZYTIGA is for those who have advanced cancer, i.e., it has spread outside the prostate to other areas of the body. The SFGate article?Prostate cancer drug so effective trial stopped?concerns a particular group of prostate cancer patients: those "whose cancer had metastasized, may have been treated with other hormone therapies but had not yet gone through chemotherapy." The FDA has already approved the drug for those that have undergone chemotherapy. See the?ZYTIGA website.

Get this. Hormone therapy is used to fight the cancer. "The cancer cells rely on testosterone to exist, [. . .] but?the cancer cells develop the ability to make their own hormone and learn to survive even in the face of the testosterone-blocking drugs, giving the disease the ability to progress." The new FDA approved drug "can go inside the cancer cell and block it from making its own testosterone."

See this about the drug from the manufacturer: "ZYTIGA? (abiraterone acetate) is for men who have castration-resistant prostate cancer (also known as CRPC, which is defined as prostate cancer that is resistant to medical or surgical treatments that lower testosterone) that has spread to other parts of the body (called metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer, or mCRPC) and who have received chemotherapy with docetaxel."

Castration- resistant. Now that paints a rather disturbing picture, but castration is a treatment option to cut off (sorry) the supply of testosterone. One suspects that life after cancer diagnosis and treatment is not much of a life - but you are alive.

There was noting in the article that informs on the cost of these drugs. But it must be cost prohibitive without health insurance, and that isn't available without FDA approval of the drug.?How long does it take?

"It takes on average 12 years and over US$350 million to get a new drug from the laboratory onto the pharmacy shelf. Once a company develops a drug, it undergoes around three and a half years of laboratory testing, before an application is made to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to begin testing the drug in humans." [Drug Approval Process Information].

The 2012 article too gives by two examples the slow growth of Prostate cancer. In one, the man, now 83, was diagnosed in 1997 and was determined to have spread in 2006. The other man, now 65, was diagnosed in 2000 with cancer that had already spread to his hip bone. For one it has been 15 years and for the other 12 years since diagnosis. But remember the cancer may have actually started growing many years before the diagnosis.

In an odd way - the fact that prostate cancer is slow to develop -there will be many who will be able to take advantage, assuming affordability, of the new drug despite the inherent delays in the?process of obtaining FDA approval.

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