Prostate Cancer Patients With Biochemical Recurrence

When BCR is present, detection of recurrence as well as the location, distribution and number of metastatic sites would determine the choice of subsequent management. In the search of malignancy in patients with BCR, standard of care tests include Pelvic CT or MRI (to look for recurrence and/or pelvic nodal metastases) and a planar bone scan to look for skeletal metastases. However, standard of care testing has a low diagnostic yield of only 11% of patients for visualizing sites of disease (5). Thus, there is a clear need for better imaging approaches. 18F-Fluciclovine is a synthetic amino acid PET tracer approved by the Food and Drug Administration in June of 2016 for the detection of sites of recurrence in men with rising prostate-specific antigen levels after prior primary treatment of prostate cancer (6), based on its diagnostic performance (7,8). However, there is a gap in the literature regarding prospective studies evaluation of detection rate of 18F-Fluciclovine compared to current standard of care imaging techniques. Therefore, 18F-Fluciclovine has already been approved by the FDA and covered CMS and insurance companies but is yet to be included in the NCCN guidelines in the work up of PCa patients with BCR.