Prostate cancer might have a new solid treatment. Researchers have discovered that a drug commonly used for breast cancer could also provide good results for prostate cancer. The study looked into the effects of talazoparib, a drug that is taken daily in the form of a pill.
“These data suggest that talazoparib has durable antitumor activity against lethal prostate cancers with various DNA repair defects that directly or indirectly impact HRR. The favorable benefit-risk profile supports the study of talazoparib in larger, randomized clinical trials, including in men with non-BRCA alterations,” wrote the authors of the study.
The research discovered that talazoparib was highly effective for men who were genetically predisposed to develop prostate cancer because of their mutate BRCA gene. The published paper showed results from the second phase of their study, and the participants were males over the age of 18, recruited from “43 hospitals, cancer centres, and medical centres in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, South Korea, the UK, and the USA.”
All participants had “progressive, metastatic, castration-resistant prostate cancers of adenocarcinoma histology, measurable soft-tissue disease”. The study progressed for three years, from 2017 to 2020 and the results showed that “the objective response rate was 29·8% (31 of 104 patients; 95% CI 21·2–39·6). The most common grade 3–4 treatment-emergent adverse events were anaemia (39 [31%] of 127 patients), thrombocytopenia (11 [9%]), and neutropenia (ten [8%]).”
This research can represent the first step for the implementation of the drug into the prostate cancer treatment. “Talazoparib is now among a handful of precision medicines that have been shown to be safe and effective at controlling advanced prostate cancer. We need to drive progress in this area as quickly as possible,” explained Matthew Hobbs, director of research at Prostate Cancer UK.
