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Overall survival and response pattern of castration-resistant metastatic prostate cancer to multiple cycles of radioligand therapy using [177Lu]Lu-PSMA-617

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Abstract

Purpose

Up to 30% of patients with castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) do not show any response to the first cycle of radioligand therapy (RLT) with [177Lu]Lu-PSMA-617 (Lu-PSMA). We evaluated patient response to the second and third cycles of RLT in patients that underwent at least three cycles. The second aim of this study was to calculate the median overall survival (OS) of responders and non-responders after the first cycle and after all three cycles of RLT.

Methods

CRPC patients were treated with Lu-PSMA, with a median interval of 8 weeks between each cycle. The tumour marker prostate-specific antigen (PSA) was used as the marker for response evaluation.

Results

Fifty-two patients underwent a total of 190 cycles of RLT (3–6 cycles per patient). Of these, 80.8% showed a decline in PSA 2 months after the first cycle, with 44.2% showing a PSA decline of ≥50%. When compared to baseline PSA, 73.1% showed a PSA decline after the third cycle. 50% of patients that did not show any response to the first cycle also did not respond to the second and third cycles. The median OS was 60 weeks in all patients. The median OS was significantly longer for patients that showed any PSA decline after the first cycle compared to patients without PSA decline (68 vs. 33 weeks). There was a significant difference in median OS between responders and non-responders for a change in PSA after the third cycle compared to baseline PSA.

Conclusion

Patients with a positive response to RLT, regardless of the rate of decline, had a significantly longer median OS. Of the patients that did not show any response to the first cycle, 50% responded to the second or third cycles.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the nursing staff of the treatment ward in our department. We give special thanks to our study nurse, Mrs. Ulrike Kuhn-Seifer (Department of Nuclear Medicine Bonn).

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Author notes

  1. Hojjat Ahmadzadehfar and Simone Wegen contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Nuclear Medicine, University Hospital Bonn, 53127, Bonn, Germany

    Hojjat Ahmadzadehfar, Simone Wegen, Anna Yordanova, Stefan Kürpig, Elisabeth Eppard, Xiao Wei, Carl Schlenkhoff & Markus Essler

  2. Institute for Medical Biometry, Informatics and Epidemiology, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany

    Rolf Fimmers

  3. Department of Urology, University Hospital Bonn, Bonn, Germany

    Stefan Hauser

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  1. Hojjat Ahmadzadehfar
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  2. Simone Wegen
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Correspondence to Hojjat Ahmadzadehfar.

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The authors declare that they have no financial or non-financial competing interests.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Ahmadzadehfar, H., Wegen, S., Yordanova, A. et al. Overall survival and response pattern of castration-resistant metastatic prostate cancer to multiple cycles of radioligand therapy using [177Lu]Lu-PSMA-617. Eur J Nucl Med Mol Imaging 44, 1448–1454 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00259-017-3716-2

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