Dr. Lowentritt on future directions in the management of prostate cancer

In an interview at the 2023 LUGPA Annual Meeting in Orlando, Florida, Benjamin H. Lowentritt, MD, FACS, shared his thoughts on what the biggest story in prostate cancer may be in the coming years. Lowentritt is the medical director for the comprehensive prostate cancer program at Chesapeake Urology in Baltimore, Maryland.

Video Transcript:

The biggest thing that we're seeing in prostate cancer now, and I think will continue to evolve, is really getting into narrowing our different types and stratifying patients differently. We talk now a lot about treatment intensification, and then frankly, more and more about treatment deintensification for patients that are super responders or are doing very well or may have certain patterns of disease. I think getting into the genomics, getting into the pattern of spread from metastases, and with some of the newer treatments coming out moving into different spaces, it's really going to be understanding, "okay, here's a group of 2% of patients that might respond well to this treatment. Here's another 8% that might respond to this." The question is how big can we get where we have subtypes of the prostate cancer in a way that are each going to respond or can be expected to respond to different therapies better. Inclusive of that is which ones then can we more comfortably say we don't have to treat as aggressively. It's going to take a long time to get to that point, but I think that's what the next 10, 15, 20 years of prostate cancer is really going to be, and cancer in general. Where are we finding the really good successes, frankly, in any cancer, and how many of those patients may actually be in prostate cancer? From a largely genomic basis in that respect, and can we target certain things to be better. There's excitement around targeting based off of PSMA and some of the radioligands and some of the other conjugates that are coming out to be able to treat the cancer. I think even that is more of a broad treatment for prostate cancer, and I think we're going to be even getting more and more specific.

This transcription has been edited for clarity.