U Researcher Leads National Study to Optimize Response Assessment with Prostate Cancer Treatments
Author: Angel Mendez, UMN Medical School Communications Manager
When Arpit Rao, MBBS, began his oncology rotations during residency, it wasn't the practice that inspired his career in prostate cancer research and treatment—it was the patients.
"Patients with prostate cancer are generally older men with a different perspective on life. I found that they tend to be just grateful for every year of their lives after the diagnosis," Dr. Rao said.
Today, Dr. Rao is an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School and a member of the Masonic Cancer Center. Last fall, he received the Alliance Scholar Award, a two-year research grant from the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology. The Alliance, which is one of only four national clinical trial networks funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), conducts clinical research at hundreds of sites across the country and has nearly 10,000 members.
Dr. Rao will lead a multi-institutional team of Alliance investigators, including those at NYU-Cornell, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Mayo Clinic, to develop a response-adaptive imaging strategy in metastatic, castration-resistant prostate cancer.
“When patients get put on clinical trials of new treatments, two of the most important things we want to find out are what proportion of patients are responding to the treatment and for how long,” Dr. Rao said.
Response assessment in prostate cancer trials is done by measuring blood prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels and doing periodic CT and bone scans. However, regular scans come with side effects from radiation and contrast exposure in addition to being expensive and labor-intensive.
“Ideally, to get the exact date of progress, one would need to be scanned every day, but you can’t do that. So, we have to find a way to balance the frequency of scans with the risk of scans,” he said.
Dr. Rao, who is currently leading a few clinical trials nationally, says that clinical trials follow the Prostate Cancer Working Group guidelines, which recommend scanning patients every eight to nine weeks during the first six months and every 12 weeks thereafter. However, this one-size-fits-all approach may not be needed for everyone.