Dr Cora Sternberg

Joseph Ischia: I’m Joseph Ischia, Talking Urology, with Dr Cora Sternberg from Rome, Italy who’s come all the way here to tell us about prostate cancer heterogeneity. What were the key two or three points you want us to take home from your talk that you gave?

Cora Sternberg: Thank you very much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. This has been a wonderful congress. Well, my first talk was on prostate cancer heterogeneity and the main point is that prostate cancer is a highly heterogeneous disease. We have unequivocal evidence of continued involvement of the androgen receptor signaling axis throughout all of the course of a patient’s disease, but the disease changes as we give the patients different therapies and it changes along its way. We now know that 90% of patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer harbor clinically actionable molecular alterations and the 20% of metastatic CRPC patients harbor DNA repair pathway aberrations, 12% have germline mutations and this is something very new. These are patients who have aggressive disease. They have germline mutations. This has implications also for their family but has implications for treatment because they’re more likely to respond to things like PARP inhibitors or cisplatinum. So I think molecular classification will definitely guide our future treatments and we have emerging technology such as cell-free DNA for instance, that can help us perhaps without even doing serial biopsies to identify the genomic alterations that will able us to guide our future biomarker-driven trials and therapy for our patients. Thank you.

Joseph: So, thank you very much Cora. It’s been a real pleasure having you here.

Cora: My pleasure.