New Hope For Later Stage Prostate Cancer Patients: The PARP Inhibitor Olaparib Approved By The FDA

The drug is part of a class of medications called PARP inhibitors that selectively target and kills cancer cells associated with tumors that have defects in their ability to repair their DNA.  This helps block prostate cancer growth.

This new approval of the PARP Inhibitor specifically covers men with homologous recombination repair (HRR) MCRPC, which is a process that repairs damaged DNA strands.

“This FDA approval will benefit patients by providing a new option that delays progression and prolongs life in a subset of patients,” Dr. Freedland says. “More importantly, for the many men with mCRPC, more active drugs means more hope — that it can delay progression and prolong life, allowing them to live longer and better and continue to hope for even more breakthroughs in the future.”

Dr. Stephen Freedland explains how hormonal therapies work for advanced prostate cancer patients

For mCRPC patients, the approval of Olaparib represents a step towards more personalized therapies, where doctors will be able to examine genetic markers in patients’ tumors in order to provide suitable and accurate treatment options. For those within a specific subgroup, this can be life-saving.

“It is an important step forward in the goal of personalized medicine – to understand someone’s tumor at the genomic level and pick the best treatment for them based upon their tumor,” Dr. Freedland explains. “This approval clearly establishes that HRR mutations are important in prostate cancer and opens the door to testing these agents even earlier in the disease as well as in combination with other therapies.”

The Importance Of Genetic Testing In Prostate Cancer

For advanced prostate cancer patients, genetic testing not only provides clues as to how to treat the disease, but it may also reveal the cancer’s genetic tendency to behave in a certain way. This means genetic testing may be critical way oncologists can tailor patients’ treatments in order to have the best results.

Additionally, learning whether you have a genetic cancer gene will be extremely significant for other family members, since men with a family history are considered high risk and need to be screened at a much younger age.

Dr. Eli Van Allen explains why genetic testing is critical for advanced prostate cancer patients

“We think there are actually a diverse set of drugs that we can apply to men [with genetic mutations], and that’s actually paving the way for a lot of innovative new clinical trials to match patients to those drugs based off of their genetics, which again sort of emphasizes our goal of actually bringing precision medicine to prostate cancer,” Dr. Eli Van Allen, a medical oncologist specializing in prostate, bladder, kidney and testicular cancers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, tells SurvivorNet.

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