Pioneering drug that hits prostate cancer’s weak spot gives hope to men with the incurable disease

Men with incurable prostate cancer have been offered hope of a longer life thanks to a drug that targets the disease’s ‘Achilles heel’. Olaparib works by interfering with a key process that allows some tumour cells to repair themselves, and proved so effective in trials it’s now being assessed for NHS use. The drug is already given to women with a specific type of breast and ovarian cancer caused by the faulty BRCA gene, and prostate cancer experts have welcomed its ‘profound’ effect on a rapidly fatal form of the disease. Roughly 50,000 men in the UK each year are diagnosed with cancer of the prostate – a gland found just below the bladder. Eight in ten survive a decade or more. For those with early-stage prostate cancer – before it has started to spread – surgery alone is likely to provide a cure. Even for those at later stages, when a cure is no longer possible, medicines that target the hormone testosterone, which drives many prostate cancers, are effective in controlling the disease for many years. Men with incurable prostate cancer have been offered hope of a longer life thanks to a drug that targets the disease’s ‘Achilles heel’…. Read full this story

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