Focal Therapy For Prostate Cancer: A Urologist’s View

Dr. Edward Schaeffer is the chair of the departments of Urology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

Prostatepedia spoke with him about focal therapy for prostate cancer.

Why did you become a doctor?

Dr. Schaeffer: I’ve always been fascinated with how things work. My fascination dates back to when I was a child who loved to understand the mechanisms that made an alarm clock work. Over time, that interest in the mechanical nature of things evolved to an interest in the complexities of animals and living things. From there, I got intrigued by not just normal anatomy and physiology, but also by understanding how and why things break down. Restoring things to normal is one appealing part of medicine.

If you can understand why things fall apart, you can understand how to fix them. That is the essence of part of medicine. The other part of medicine is humanism, the ability to help people. It’s truly such an honor to help people with their problems. I’m reminded of that privilege daily.

Have any particular patients over the years stood out in your mind? Any cases that may have changed how you view the art of medicine?

Dr. Schaeffer: I have an open style with my patients, and they can all reach me through my personal cellphone number. I give them my personal number because I view my position in their lives as a privileged one.

Patients come to me with a problem, and they really open up to me about their own health problems, their anxiety and fear, and the psychological impact that their new disease diagnosis has had on their life. Because they’ve been so open with me, I view it as part of my role as a physician to give them access to me if they need me.

I’ve developed personal and close relationships with all of my patients. I maintain objectivity, but the disease I take care of is a personal one. It’s a cancer, and there can be a lot of emotional burdens that go with it. My patients are always changing my view of my role in medicine and my role in life and family. I’ve learned so much from them.

That’s fairly unusual to provide your own cellphone number, isn’t it?

Dr. Schaeffer: It’s highly unusual! But I’ve never done anything based on what other people do. I just do what I think is right.

What is focal therapy, and where does it fit into the spectrum of treatments that are available to men with prostate cancer today?

Dr. Schaeffer: Focal therapy is one type of interventional treatment for men who have localized prostate cancer and for men who have localized prostate cancer that is contained within the particular focused area of the prostate.

Generally speaking, when patients have a low-volume, low-grade prostate cancer, the first go-to option is typically a program of surveillance because we often deem these as cancers that don’t require any active intervention. But some patients want to do something or don’t want to have treatment of their entire prostate, and so they may request that we focally ablate the suspicious or concerning area. That is a potential option.

When we do focal therapy, we always have to follow the patient and monitor not only the area we treated but also the other areas of the prostate for cancers that may crop up.

In some ways, it’s more intensive active surveillance because it’s active surveillance plus something. On the spectrum, it’s a minimalist approach, but the jury is still out as to whether it’s an effective approach. While there are many anecdotes out there where people have thought it’s been successful, it hasn’t been widely studied.

Is that one of the controversies around focal therapy?

Dr. Schaeffer: Yes, I would say so. It has not been rigorously studied with one exception. One type of focal therapy, photodynamic therapy, has been studied in a prospective clinical trial. This trial was promising: it showed that focal therapy can reduce the amount of cancer and reduce the progression of cancer.

Are the side effects fewer with focal therapy than with whole-gland therapy?

Dr. Schaeffer: That is the idea of it. That is correct.

Let’s say someone gets focal therapy and then their cancer recurs. Does the previous focal therapy impact or impede their ability to get another primary therapy like radical prostatectomy or radiation?

Dr. Schaeffer: It makes it more potentially challenging to do what we would then call definitive secondary or salvage treatment, but that’s not true for every patient all the time. When somebody has prostate cancer in one area of the prostate and undergoes focal therapy, they’re monitored for two things.

One is recurrence or regrowth of the cancer locally. Second is the development of additional cancer in another area of the prostate. Individuals who have had focal therapy may require additional treatment for one of two reasons.

One reason may be that the area where the cancer was before was not effectively treated the first time. That would be disease persistence. Then the other reason may be that perhaps a cancer developed in another region of the prostate. We know that prostate cancer is a multi-focal disease, so it certainly is possible that a cancer could occur somewhere else. That is why people who have had focal therapy can’t give up monitoring their cancer over time.

Any other controversies over the role of focal therapy?

Dr. Schaeffer: The main controversy in terms of focal therapy has to do with the fact that many consider focal therapy to be a treatment, that if you can detect the cancer on MRI, for example, you could focally treat the MR-visible area. There is good research from UCLA and other groups that shows that the volume of the cancer that was originally noted on MRI underestimates the true volume of the cancer by two or three times in some cases.

So, what should you treat? Should you treat only the MRI-visible area, or should you treat the MRI-visible area plus a boundary of prostate around it because there’s this possibility that cancer may extend beyond the MRI visibility? That’s a big controversial area because the more broadly you expand your focal treatment area, the more you increase the possibility of having side effects from more extensive treatment.

Do you have any advice for men who are considering focal therapy?

Dr. Schaeffer: For all individuals with a new diagnosis of prostate cancer, they should really seek the advice of an expert. Somebody who’s well-versed in all treatment options for prostate cancer would be very helpful.

I don’t perform focal therapy myself, but I know experts who do. If I believe someone’s a good candidate for it, or if I think that someone’s not a good candidate for focal therapy, but they’re still interested, I’ll refer them to an expert so that my patients can get their advice. I think it’s important that patients seek advice from an expert in the management of prostate cancer who can help them understand the full implications of the treatment options.

Would you encourage most patients to seek a second opinion?

Dr. Schaeffer: I do, unless their diagnosis was at an NCI-designated cancer center or hospital in similar standing. If they’re at a center of excellence already, they don’t have to go to a second one unless you’re uncomfortable with your team. I think that the idea of seeking out somebody with expertise in that particular disease area is very important to get the best advice possible.

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Join a clinical trial: Using PET/MRI in HIFU Planning

Dr. Timothy J. Daskivich is a urologic oncologist in the Cedars-Sinai Urology Academic Program and the director of Health Services Research for the Cedars-Sinai Department of Surgery.

Prostatepedia spoke with him about his clinical trial on using high-resolution PET/MRI in planning high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) for prostate cancer.

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Why did you become a doctor? What was it about medicine that drew you in?

Dr. Daskivich: I always knew that I loved science, but I wanted to do something where I could impact individual lives. I’m also a people person, and I love to get to know people and hear their stories. Being a doctor is a kind of mash-up of those two interests: my love of science and discovery with the human aspect of being a doctor.

Now I’m a physician-scientist: I do the science part of my work half of my time, and for the other half, I see patients and operate. They’re related but very different, and I love the dichotomy.

I’m sure one informs the other.

Dr. Daskivich: Absolutely. I actually have a good example of how my research connects these two parts of my job. I have a Mentored Clinical Scientist Research Career Development K08 Award from National Cancer Institute that aims to improve communication between doctors and patients about life expectancy after a new diagnosis of prostate, kidney, or bladder cancer. This study involves recording treatment consultation consultations between doctors and patients to better understand what is being said about life expectancy in these discussions. We follow this with a structured interview with the patient to ask about what worked well or what could have been improved. Based on what we observe, we’re planning to create a patient-centered approach to discussing life expectancy. This study allows me to talk to the patients, hear their stories, and then bring their perspective back to physicians to try to improve communication. It’s a lot of fun, and one aspect informs the other.

Can you talk to us a bit about the context of the clinical trial you’re running?

Dr. Daskivich: Our clinical trial involves testing whether fluciclovine PET-MRI can improve localization of tumors within the prostate (compared to standard multiparametric MRI) prior to focal treatment with high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU).

To help you understand why this trial is important, let me first give you some background. For many years, we used surgery or radiation to treat the entire prostate for patients with prostate cancer. We either removed or radiated the entire gland. That was the standard of care for a long time. But the problem with whole-gland treatment is that it incurs a lot of side effects—erectile dysfunction, urinary incontinence, or irritative urinary symptoms—by damaging structures near the prostate like the nerves that supply the erectile function of the penis and the bladder neck.

In order to minimize those side effects, there’s been a movement to consider focally treating the prostate cancer lesions and leaving the rest of the prostate intact. That had been a pipe dream for a long time, until recently when the technology has become available to identify and focally treat prostate cancer lesions in a minimally invasive and highly precise way. It’s actually a confluence of three technologies that have made focal therapy possible.

The first of these technologies is high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU). HIFU directs high-intensity ultrasound waves to a point in space, and that point is destroyed. It’s a little bit like using a magnifying glass to harness the rays of the sun to burn a leaf. When you pass your hand between the magnifying glass and the leaf, you don’t get burned. With HIFU, you can place a probe into the rectum, direct the ultrasound waves to destroy an area in the prostate and destroy it while leaving all the intervening tissue unharmed.

The second technology is MRI, which we use to localize cancers within the prostate. MRI has about 80% sensitivity for detection of high-grade cancers within the prostate. And not only can it detect them, but it can define exactly where they are.

The third technology is MRI-ultrasound fusion. This technology allows us to overlay MRI images—including the location of tumors—onto ultrasound images in real time. This is important since we use ultrasound as our primary imaging modality to direct HIFU to the areas of the prostate that are affected by cancer. Now with MR/US-fusion technology, we can superimpose the location of tumors as identified by MRI directly onto the ultrasound when we’re targeting our HIFU beam.

All of these technologies—MRI of the prostate to identify location of tumors, ultrasound fusion to target the tumors in real time, and HIFU to precisely transmit energy to these areas—have made focal therapy of the prostate possible.

Our study acknowledges the fact that focal treatment of prostate cancer is entirely dependent on imaging. If I’m going to take out the entire prostate gland, there is a huge safety net for error. If we thought that the cancer was on the right side, but lo and behold, there were a few lesions on the left, it’s no problem–we’ve taken the whole thing out, so we’ve removed the unseen cancer. However, now that we’re doing focal therapy, that safety net is gone. If you fail to detect a prostate cancer prior to doing a focal treatment and therefore don’t treat that area, then you haven’t fully treated the cancer.

In this study, we’re using high-resolution PET/MRI to precisely identify prostate cancers during HIFU planning. Before HIFU, all the patients on the trial get a high-resolution MRI (six-fold improved resolution compared with standard MRI) and fluciclovine PET-MRI to map out where prostate cancers may be located. We then biopsy all lesions that are positive on the PET or on the high-resolution MRI using ultrasound fusion technology. Then based on that map, we do focal HIFU on all areas that are positive for cancer.

With improved cancer mapping using high-resolution PET/MRI, we hope to be better at treating the cancer completely. By maximizing our imaging, we hope to maximize the cure rate.

What sort of follow up are you doing after the focal therapy?

Dr. Daskivich: At six months after focal therapy with HIFU, patients get another prostate MRI and targeted biopsy in both the treated and untreated zones. We also follow with serial PSA levels.

Do patients need to come to you for the initial imaging and HIFU?

Dr. Daskivich: Patients come to us already having been diagnosed with prostate cancer on biopsy. We then do the high-resolution PET MRI and repeat targeted biopsy based on the advanced imaging at Cedars Sinai. Patients who remain eligible and interested in HIFU go on to get this treatment at Cedars Sinai.

Do they need to come back to your center for the follow-up MRI and PSA testing, or can they do that at a remote location?

Dr. Daskivich: Yes, patients do need to do follow up MRI and targeted prostate biopsy at 6 months at Cedars Sinai. PSA testing can be done at a remote location if necessary.

Is there are any fee to patients for participating in the trial?

Dr. Daskivich: All procedures that are not standard-of-care are funded by the trial. This includes the high-resolution and PET components of the MRI. Importantly, though, the HIFU is an out-of-pocket cost for participants, since it is a standard of care procedure and we’re studying the imaging and not the HIFU procedure itself.

Is all the follow-up covered?

Dr. Daskivich: Most often, insurers cover follow up imaging for prostate cancer treated with HIFU as standard of care.

Any particular eligibility criteria you’d like to highlight?

Dr. Daskivich: Participants on this trial must either have clinically localized, unilateral high-grade (Gleason 7 or higher) or high-volume Gleason 6 (>50% of cores involved) disease. Those with unilateral high-grade disease can also have contra-lateral low-grade (Gleason 6) disease, but they cannot have bilateral high-grade disease. PSA must also be less than 20.

We specifically designed the study to exclude patients with low-volume Gleason 6 disease (<50% percent of the cores involved). This is because active surveillance is a better treatment option for most patients with low-volume, low-risk prostate cancer.

Any final thoughts or advice for patients?

Dr. Daskivich: I was initially a skeptic about focal therapy, and that’s why I wrote this trial. I wanted to document all of the outcomes in a very systematic way and convince myself that it was effective. Having used focal therapy with HIFU for some time now, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how effective and minimally morbid it is, at least in the short term. Cancer control has been excellent in the short term and the side effect profile is much better than traditional therapies like surgery or radiation. HIFU is done as outpatient treatment as well, so it is also convenient. It’s honestly quite refreshing to have a prostate cancer therapy that doesn’t come along with the traditional baggage of urinary incontinence and erectile dysfunction.

Which can be debilitating.

Dr. Daskivich: Which can be very debilitating, even if it is experienced for only a short period of time. If the long-term cancer control of focal therapies for prostate cancer like HIFU turn out to be durable, then it could change the standard-of-care for unilateral high-grade disease. Time will tell.

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Dr. Hashim U. Ahmed on Today’s Focal Therapy For Prostate Cancer

Dr. Ahmed is Professor and Chair of Urology at London’s Imperial College Healthcare.

His research focuses on prostate diagnosis using novel imaging and tissue biomarkers, prostate treatments that reduce the harms of traditional surgery and radiotherapy, and clinical trials and health technology evaluation.

Prostatepedia spoke with him about the current state of focal therapy for prostate cancer.

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What is focal therapy?

Dr. Ahmed: Focal therapy is about targeting the tumor within the prostate with a margin of normal tissue. The tumor is one that we believe that were we to leave it untreated, would progress, grow and spread, and impact the patient’s life at some point. By doing so, we avoid treating the entire prostate. We avoid damaging as much normal little tissue as possible. By damaging as little tissue as possible, we aim to maintain as much function as possible for that particular man, whilst at the same time treating the cancer that would otherwise cause problems in the future.

What are some of the various forms of focal therapy? Focal therapy is an umbrella term, is it not?

Dr. Ahmed: It is an umbrella term. I often joke that there’s almost like a catwalk of treatments that can be used for focal therapy. The traditional ones were cryotherapy, which freezes the tissue, and high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU), which uses very focused ultrasound waves that heat up the prostate. You can use laser, which also heats up the prostate. You can use electrocution of the cells, which is called irreversible electroporation. There are now some new injectable drugs. You can inject hormone drugs or molecules that are activated by PSA, which then kill the prostate cells once they are injected into the prostate. There’s a lot of activity going on.

What I often say is that all of these different modalities are interesting. It’s good to see that commercial bodies are really interested in this field. That shows that the concept has real legs and everybody sees this as a big future, so that everybody’s crowding into the market. Ultimately, these are all tools, if you like— surgical instruments for me to do my focal therapy. No one tool can be applied to all tumors.

Let me take an example. If you had a big prostate with a tumor high up in the gland, there’s no way HIFU would be able to reach it. The ultrasound wave just can’t get that far. Even if it could, by the time it reached the tumor, there would be so much tissue it went through that it would lose its energy. For that particular tumor, an anterior tumor, something like cryotherapy is probably going to be better for that particular man than HIFU. A posterior tumor near the rectum, but contained in the prostate, probably does really well from HIFU at the moment, but could easily be treated in the future using these injectable drugs, if they’re to be efficacious.

Which form of focal therapy is best really does depend on where the tumor is, how big it is, and how big the man’s prostate is. Are there other characteristics within the prostate, for instance, like calcification, which means you can’t see the tumor? Those calcifications might, potentially, deflect the energy. There are a lot of other considerations, but there are quite a lot of things that you can use. I would say the two that are in pole position at the moment, just because they’ve been around for longer and therefore they have a lot of data, and the two that I use routinely in clinical practice, are HIFU and cryotherapy.

For which men is focal therapy usually an appropriate choice?

Dr. Ahmed: Firstly, focal therapy is a choice for the man who wishes to preserve or minimize his risk of genitourinary side effects like incontinence and erectile dysfunction as much as possible. You could argue that everybody wants that, but there are some men who will just have radical treatment and say to me, “I understand that I have side effects, but I just want it sorted out.” There are other men who prioritize minimizing the genitourinary impact that treatments have.

Focal therapy is also a good choice for men who have one index lesion. In other words, they have one tumor that is clinically significant, but at the same time have either no other tumors or one or two clinically insignificant cancers. In those men, we would target the main, biggest, or highest grade tumor because that is the one, studies have shown, that is likely to grow, progress, and metastasize if it was left on its own. The other, smaller, low-risk lesions are the type of indolent disease that a lot of men in the male population have that doesn’t need immediate treatment. You can monitor those after you’ve knocked out the main tumor, for instance.

You wouldn’t want to just knock out those one or two insignificant cancers while you were in there anyway because of potential side effects?

Dr. Ahmed: One of the reasons is it’s difficult to localize one or two millimeters of low-risk disease. In order to treat those, you’d have to end up treating a block of tissue. By the time you’d treated that block of tissue, or two other blocks of tissue, you’re probably at 70 to 80% of the prostate volume.

And if you do that, you might as well just target the whole thing?

Dr. Ahmed: You might as well just treat the whole thing because you’re going to cause as much damage. These small lesions are often not visible on MRI. They’re found on random, systematic biopsies, and you have no idea exactly where they are.

Another consideration is the characteristics of the lesion itself that we would want to treat. It could be one of two things: intermediate Gleason Grade 7, so 3+4 or 4+3. Or, there’s an increasing recognition that high volume Gleason Grade 6 is also something that is better treated immediately than monitored because that is also likely to progress.

For unfavorable, if you like, low-risk disease and intermediate-risk disease where there is one index lesion you can carry out focal therapy. If you can have intermediate-risk disease, which has two or three significant lesions, you would be better served having radical therapy.

What happens if a man gets focal therapy and later his cancer recurs? Can he go on to other subsequent treatments?

Dr. Ahmed: This is quite an important topic now. We know that following focal cryotherapy, focal HIFU, and some of the newer emerging focal therapy modalities that about 15 to 20% of men will either have residual or recurrent disease in the area that’s already been treated. Most of those men will be eligible to have a repeat session of HIFU or cryotherapy. Certainly in my practice, I tell men there is a one in five chance that we may have to repeat the focal therapy to the same area. Almost invariably, all men see that as just part of the intervention. I would argue having two treatments in a fifth of men is probably part of the treatment.

If they fail two treatments in that area, then they really should go on to have radical therapy, or a change in the type of treatment that you give. If the cancer has resisted 80 to 90 degrees centigrade temperature changes twice, or with cryotherapy minus 50/minus 60 degree centigrade twice, then that is an aggressive tumor. It probably has got a very aggressive blood supply and we need to change tacks.

There is a group of men who develop new lesions in untreated tissue. Some of those men can have another focal therapy, but most of them will go on to have radical therapy because their untreated tissue, if you like, has declared itself as unstable. It has a propensity to develop new tumors, and therefore, it would be better to treat the entire prostate.

About 15 to 20% of men over five to six years need a second focal therapy treatment. Overall, about 5 to 7% of men go on to have radical therapy, despite one or two focal therapy sessions. Now that is five to six-year data; we don’t have ten-year data at the moment, either from HIFU or cryotherapy. The newer modalities don’t even have five to six-year data.

Is it safe to say focal therapy is still an emerging option and that we still don’t have all the data?

Dr. Ahmed: I guess it depends on how you define that level of evidence. If we have to wait ten to fifteen years, then yes. If you argue that we’ve now got good five to ten-year data showing non-inferior cancer control, superior toxicity, or superior side effect profiles after focal therapy, then there are a considerable group of men who will accept the uncertainty of the lack of ten to fifteen-year data. They prioritize genitourinary function and they are not compromising their cancer control, at least at five to six-years median follow-up. And they can still have surgery or radiotherapy afterwards.

In the United Kingdom, in certain centers, focal therapy has been offered side by side with other radical therapies within the National Health Service, as part of the NICE, or National Institute for Clinical and Healthcare Excellence, approvals that we have.

What are some of the other controversies over focal therapy?

Dr. Ahmed: There are a number of controversies. One big controversy is this lack of ten to fifteen-year data. I was in the European Congress a couple of days ago. There was a Pro/Con focal therapy argument. I was pro and the person before me was con. He stood up and said, “We don’t have fifteen to twenty year data.” Five years ago, we didn’t have five-year data. A couple of years ago, it was you don’t have ten-year data. When we first started, they said well you don’t have any one year data on biopsies. This is the first time I’ve heard people stand up and say, well you don’t have fifteen to twenty-year data. It’s slightly amusing. It’s infuriating, as well, because the goalposts keep on changing. The long-term data will come; we’re collecting all the data in registries in the United States, the United Kingdom, and European centers. It’s all very robust data collection. We’re doing trials to see if men will accept randomization between radical and focal therapies. Those trials are tough. Men generally want to choose their therapy rather than allowing themselves to be randomized, but we’ll see.

Then the other controversies are around the areas that we touched on. What happens to the untreated tissue? So far, about 4 to 5% of men over the five to six years of median follow-up that we have in our series of several hundred cases have developed new lesions in untreated tissue. Now, those are probably just tiny bits of Gleason 7 tumors that the biopsy and MRI missed that then subsequently progressed. Some of them will be new lesions, but some of them will be disease that was missed in the first place, which declare themselves later. By ten years, it might be higher. So far it’s quite low.

One of the arguments against focal therapy is that this is a multi-focal disease. The untreated tissue is just going to show up with lots and lots of cancers, but that has not been the case, so that has been quite reassuring. The other controversy is around the point that MRI is not good enough and biopsy is not good enough. But I think both MRI and targeted biopsy are good enough. You can never be 100% in anything. If you look at breast mammography, the data shows that a negative mammogram can miss anywhere between 5 to 30% of breast cancers, yet we still use it as a screening tool. We all accept that nothing in medicine is certain. Then there’s concern about what happens to men who fail focal therapy. Can we remove the prostate, or are these men too scarred. What happens in terms of their cancer control? It’s early days yet, but certainly technically, removing a prostate after focal therapy is easier than removing a prostate after failed radiotherapy. It certainly is more scarred around the treated area, though. Does that mean men shouldn’t have focal therapy?

I would argue not because we’re giving radiotherapy to hundreds of thousands of men. It’s an accepted treatment modality, and if it does fail, it’s tough surgery afterwards. That is, unfortunately, the nature of the beast. When the first treatment fails, secondary treatments are always going to be a little bit more difficult, if not a lot more difficult.

It is difficult to perform that second surgery or men will have more side effects after their surgery?

Dr. Ahmed: The concern is both. If it’s more difficult to perform, then are they likely to suffer more side effects? And, as a result of the surgery being difficult, are we going to get more positive margins? Are they going to fail more often?

These are men whose tumors are going to be very aggressive by nature because, as I said, they resisted extremes of temperature, sometimes twice, and there are still a few cells. So they’re going to be pretty aggressive. The failure rates might be higher in that group, just because of the focal therapy paradigm. Just like radiotherapy, when you get radio-resistant cancers they are generally more aggressive and nastier cancers just by natural selection, if you like.

Do you have any advice for men who are considering focal therapy?

Dr. Ahmed: It’s very important when you are first diagnosed with prostate cancer not to rush into treatment. It’s important to do as much reading as you can and have consultations with urologists and radiation oncologists. If you haven’t been told about focal therapy, ask whether you’re suitable. You might get an answer that says, “Well, it’s not proven.” But if you are keen to explore it, you should definitely have a consultation with somebody who does focal therapy so that they can tell you first whether you are suitable, and secondly, what the outcomes might be in your case. I think every good focal therapist will share the uncertainties, as well as the certainties, around the treatment that they give.

If they’re not sharing those uncertainties, then see somebody else. It’s also very important that they quote their own data. That data, ideally, should be published in the public domain because that is a sign, first of all, that you’re being told the right outcomes for that surgeon or physician. Also, it’s a sign that physician takes their trade seriously and is constantly looking to see how they can improve, as well as sharing their data with their peers.

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Join A Trial On Focal Therapy For Prostate Cancer

Dr. Jim Hu is a urologic oncologist at Weill Cornell Medical College, where he serves as the Director of the LeFrak Center for Robotic Surgery and the Ronald P. Lynch Chair in Urologic Oncology.

Prostatepedia spoke with him about a focal therapy clinical trial that he’s running.

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What is the context for your clinical trial?

Dr. Hu: If you look at breast cancer surgery about 40 years ago, for instance, some of the trials were done to demonstrate that a lumpectomy or a partial mastectomy in many cases was as good as removing the breast entirely. In prostate cancer, focal therapy or partial gland ablation is referred to often as the male lumpectomy.

The challenge for why there hasn’t been a partial gland approach with prostate cancer is the timeline of knowing differences in outcomes. If you took a whole gland versus a partial gland approach, you’re not going to see it as quickly as you might in breast cancer, where metastasis or death can occur in a shorter time. In prostate cancer, 95 percent of men who are diagnosed are still alive 10 years after their diagnosis.

In about 75 percent of men who are diagnosed, prostate cancer is multifocal, so even if on a biopsy you find it in one area, it’s not uncommon that when prostate is removed surgically, the pathologist detects prostate cancer in multiple areas. That’s also been a barrier to the use of partial gland treatments in prostate cancer, and multifocality is less common in breast cancer.

When you’re treated for prostate cancer, the blood test biomarker to determine whether you’re free of cancer is the prostate-specific androgen (PSA). In contrast to other cancers, when you’re treated for localized disease for instance, you don’t do CAT scans or X-rays to see if something has grown back or spread because the PSA is going to become detectable before there’s any radiographic signs of a recurrence. Therefore, if you only treat part of the prostate, the part that’s untreated, the normal prostate is going to continue to produce PSA. Therefore, the PSA is not going to be a meaningful marker of cancer recurrence with partial gland ablation. There are many unknowns in terms of how we should follow these patients who have partial gland ablation approaches.

What has driven the greater interest or the increased realization of partial gland ablations? MRIs are done commonly in the United States when men have an elevated PSA as a biomarker or as a predictive test beyond an elevated PSA of what the biopsy may show. This may help them forego a biopsy, but MRI’s increased sensitivity or accuracy for finding significant cancers is about 70-80%.

Fusion-guided platforms take the MRI and fuse them to the ultrasound, which allows us to better pinpoint where the suspicious area is within the prostate. These fusion-guided platforms have enabled a more accurate diagnosis within the prostate. This has led to the application of these MRI ultrasound fusion platforms to deliver energy to kill cancer cells that have been confirmed in those areas. In other countries around the world, there has been availability of one of the partial gland approaches, high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU).

Before 2015, when the FDA approved HIFU for treating prostate cancer in this country, it was pretty common for men who were seeking partial gland treatments to fly overseas and pay out-of-pocket for these treatments.

We know that HIFU kills prostate tissue, but we don’t know what the outcomes are for prostate cancer, and therefore, the FDA has not given a prostate cancer indication. You can’t market it as treating prostate cancer, and because of the absence of comparative data to other treatments, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will not reimburse the full amount for prostate cancer treatment currently.

Other insurances follow the lead of CMS. It’s an interesting time. There is a need for comparative effectiveness research for clinical trials that compare this new treatment option of partial gland ablation to established methods of surgery, radiation, or active surveillance.

What can patients expect to happen in the trial?

Dr. Hu: In our trial, you have an MRI and a biopsy within 6 to 12 months after you get partial prostate gland ablation. There may be a tendency for people to get treated and never come back, assuming that the treatment was successful. This would almost be like receiving a placebo and not wanting to receive bad news if cancer returns.

Typically, a clinical trial means that we’re offering a treatment to a patient. We don’t really know the long-term outcomes. Therefore, there is a defined follow-up. Participants agree to get treated so that we can study this and clear up some of the uncertainty for others in the future, and so that we can detect a cancer recurrence earlier with structured follow-up. Data and outcomes are tracked as they occur, or prospectively to ensure complete collection of outcomes. We want a control group in which the patients get standard treatment and we want an experimental or an intervention group who receives the new or novel treatment. This balances differences in characteristics such as age, race, other medical issues such as diabetes, cancer characteristics, etc.

The challenge with trials in prostate cancer is that few men would agree to having their fate based on randomization. If we said to your average American man with prostate cancer that we’ll flip a coin, and if it’s heads, you’ll receive partial gland ablation, and if it’s tails, you’ll get surgery, they wouldn’t go for it.

This is reinforced by 11 randomized trials in localized prostate cancer that have failed to recruit. In this case, its also a bit of comparing apples to oranges in the sense you’re comparing treating part versus treating the entire prostate. Therefore, the side effect profiles are different in terms of incontinence, erectile dysfunction, and so forth.

It’s a space that needs more studies because there are many men who are interested in this technique.

One of the unfortunate aspects with men travelling overseas for HIFU is that we don’t know what they’re getting. We know of instances in the United States where practitioners are marketing a laser approach to prostate cancer, and men are paying $25,000 out-of-pocket, but there are too many unknowns.

Another example is laser treatments of prostate cancer which are advertised online or on billboards. These need to be studied thoroughly. Unfortunately, the out-of-pocket nature of non-coverage by insurance distorts incentives with out-of-pocket payments for new technologies that are unproven and may not be studied thoroughly in that fee-for-service environment.

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Dr. Scott Eggener on Focal Therapy for Prostate Cancer

Scott Eggener, MD, an internationally known robotic and open surgeon, specializes in caring for patients with prostate, kidney, and testicular cancers.

He is the Director of the Prostate Cancer Program and Co-Director of the High Risk & Advanced Prostate Cancer Clinic at University of Chicago Medicine.

Prostatepedia spoke with him about focal therapy for prostate cancer.

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Why did you become a doctor?

Dr. Scott Eggener: I came around to medicine later than most people. I always had an interest in science and math. The combination of being able to use those skills to help people out and to have a component of life that combines clinical care with research was ultimately the attraction that led me down this path.

Have you had any particular patients whose cases changed either how you see your own role as a doctor or how you view the art of medicine in general?

Dr. Eggener: I try to learn regularly from my patients. The overwhelming majority of cases are fairly routine from a medical standpoint, but what makes my role fascinating are the unique elements of their background or hobbies and getting to know them.

As far as memorable experiences, there are so many standouts from both the really heartwarming celebratory side and the profoundly depressing side. When you have a practice that focuses exclusively on cancer, you’ve got the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.

What is focal therapy? Where does it fit into the spectrum of treatments available to men with prostate cancer today?

Dr. Eggener: Focal therapy is a dense topic. The bird’s-eye view is that, traditionally, any treatment of prostate cancer localized to the area of the prostate is focused on the entire prostate. Unfortunately, the prostate is in ground zero of the pelvis where there are a lot of other important structures. Any treatment, even when done by a very experienced specialist, poses a risk of short and long-term side effects. The first and most important fork in the road is whether the cancer even requires treatment. Active surveillance, monitoring the cancer, is a very attractive approach for many men with an extremely low-likelihood of cancer-related problems.

The concept of focal therapy is to only treat the part of the prostate that has the cancer and leave the rest of the prostate alone with the utopian dream of limiting the risk of cancer-related problems while trying to optimize the quality of life and minimize exposure to side effects. It’s analogous to women with breast cancer. There was a time when every woman with any type of breast cancer had a radical mastectomy. Through good science, clinical trials, brave patients, and data nowadays, somewhere between 65 and 80 percent of women get a lumpectomy. We’re in the very early stages of determining whether a similar strategy is safe and smart for some men with prostate cancer.

There are different forms of focal therapy: are some forms more effective than others?

Dr. Eggener: There are literally about a dozen different ways of ablating a part of the prostate.Focal therapy is a concept of treating part of the prostate. There are a lot of different mechanisms of trying to destroy parts of the prostate. There is not enough comparative data to say A is better than B or C is worse than D. There are some focal therapy interventions that have been studied relatively rigorously. Most have been studied in small populations of men. None have sufficient longterm follow-up, and none have ever been sufficiently compared to surgery or radiation therapy, which are the conventional and time-tested treatment options.

Is that one of the controversies over focal therapy—that there’s not enough long-term data to know which is better or not?

Dr. Eggener: There are a gazillion different reasons why focal therapy is controversial. Number one is that focal therapy turned the whole paradigm on its head in that prostate cancer is typically multifocal where about three-quarters of men with prostate cancer have multiple cancers within their prostate. Reflexively, a lot of people feel the entire prostate needs to be treated.

What we know based on elegant studies is the overwhelming majority of those other cancers within the prostate are not destined to cause any problems. There are many prostate cancers that are indolent, and if they are destined to cause problems, it’ll be years or decades down the road. Some people are fundamentally opposed to the concept of treating part of the prostate. There isn’t enough high-quality, long-term data to show whether the focal therapy paradigm is beneficial for certain men.

Conceptually, it’s supposed to be helpful, but until we have proper clinical trials, that’s just speculative. That is why there are dozens of clinical trials. Hopefully, one day we’ll have quality data. There have been a lot of companies interested because it’s attractive to patients.

The FDA has recently gotten more engaged. There have been multiple public meetings with the FDA trying to figure out how best to evaluate focal therapy. There is a swell of interest, but it’s going to take thoughtful investigators to provide the data. Unfortunately, as you know, in the landscape of prostate cancer there is often a lot of enthusiasm without data supporting it. Unfortunately, there are always charlatans willing and capable of putting the cart before the horse.

Is there anything about focal therapy that would prevent a man from getting a later treatment—i.e. a radical prostatectomy or radiation therapy?

Dr. Eggener: Conceptually, the plan is to do focal therapy and it doesn’t necessarily burn any bridges. Theoretically, the more time that passes there is an increasing chance that in certain men the cancer can spread elsewhere in the body, although if you select men well for focal therapy you can minimize those risks. Depending on the type of focal therapy that’s used, some have close to no impact on the efficacy of future treatments. There are other forms of focal therapy that are more aggressive and would impact the possibility of doing surgery or radiation in the future.

Do you have advice for men reading this who might be considering focal therapy?

Dr. Eggener: It’s exciting conceptually but we’re still in the very early stages of properly evaluating this approach. There are a range of practitioners who will offer focal therapy from very thoughtful prostate cancer experts with very selective criteria, clinical trials, and tempered enthusiasm to those on the other end of the spectrum—people who are one trick ponies who believe nearly every man they see might be a candidate for focal therapy.

My advice to people is if you’re newly diagnosed with prostate cancer and think focal therapy might be an attractive option for you, seek out someone who has expertise in prostate cancer who offers focal therapy amongst many other options and can thoroughly discuss the knowns and unknowns.

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Focal Therapy

In April, we’re talking about focal therapies.

Dr. Snuffy Myers comments:

“Interest in focal therapy is fueled by the promise of cancer control with fewer side effects than are seen after radiation or radical prostatectomy. From the patient perspective, this is certainly an attractive option. As a result, we have seen the development of an increasing list of approaches to focal therapy.

There are a number of issues that make critical evaluation of the various focal therapies problematic. First, with the exception of a recent trial that involved laser, randomized clinical trials are absent. There is even a controversy about what is the best control group. The laser trial just mentioned used an active surveillance control group. The second approach would be to randomize against surgery or radiation therapy. The major problem is that such trials have proved nearly impossible to run because of poor accrual. For this reason, I suspect that focal therapies are most likely to find a clinical niche as an alternative or add-on to active surveillance.

Another issue is that we lack trials that randomize between two different focal therapies, so it is difficult to know what approach to recommend for a given patient.

For example, cryosurgery and high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) have both been around for many years and have never been directly compared in a clinical trial. In developing focal therapies, it is currently common practice to treat a group of patients with a new technology and then follow those patients over time. Results are reported after 1, 5, and 10 year follow-ups and comparisons made to historical results with radiation or radical prostatectomy.

However, we have long known that such comparisons with historical data are often unreliable. As mentioned above, a better, more time efficient approach would be to test focal therapies as an alternate or add on to active surveillance rather than as an alternate to radical prostatectomy or radiation.”

Join us to read this month’s conversations about focal therapy.