Background: Globally, cancer is the second leading cause of death, and it is estimated that over 18·1 million new cases are diagnosed annually. The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted almost every aspect of the provision and management of cancer care worldwide. The time-critical nature of COVID-19 diagnosis and the large number of patients requiring hospitalisation necessitated the rerouting of already limited resources available for cancer services and programmes to the care of COVID-19 patients. Furthermore, the stringent social distancing, restricted in-hospital visits and lockdown measures instituted by various governments resulted in the disruption of the oncologic continuum including screening, diagnostic and prevention programmes, treatments and follow-up services as well as research and clinical trial programmes. Materials and Methods: We searched several databases from October 2020 to January 2021 for relevant studies published in English between 2020 and 2021 and reporting on the impact of COVID-19 on the cancer care continuum. This narrative review paper describes the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the cancer patient care continuum from screening and prevention to treatments and ongoing management of patients. Conclusions: The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted cancer care and the management of cancer services and patients. Nevertheless, the oncology healthcare communities worldwide have done phenomenal work with joint and collaborative efforts, utilising best available evidence-based guidelines to continue to give safe and effective treatments for cancer patients while maintaining the safety of patients, healthcare professionals and the general population. Nevertheless, several healthcare centres are now faced with significant challenges with the management of the backlog of screening, diagnosis and treatment cases. It is imperative that governments, leaders of healthcare centres and healthcare professionals take all necessary actions and policies focused on minimising further system-level delays to cancer screening, diagnosis, treatment initiation and clearing of all backlogs cases from the COVID-19 pandemic in order to mitigate the negative impact on cancer outcomes.

Background: Prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in men and responsible for about 10% of all cancer mortality in both Canadian and American men. Currently, serum PSA level is the most commonly used test for the detection of prostate cancer, though the levels can also be elevated in benign conditions, has limited specificity and has a high rate of overdiagnosis and treatment of indolent disease. Consequently, in recent years, several investigations have been conducted to identify novel cancer biomarkers capable of both effective screening and diagnosis, as well as assisting to shift the diagnostic and treatment paradigm of prostate cancer towards more patient-specific and targeted medicine. The goal of this narrative review paper is to describe eleven novel and promising tissue-based biomarkers for prostate cancer capable to account for individual patient variabilities and have the potential for risk assessment, early detection and diagnosis, identification of patients who will benefit from a particular treatment and monitoring patient response to treatment. Materials and methods: We searched several databases from August to December 2020 for relevant studies published in English between 2000 and 2020 and reporting on tissue-based biomarkers for screening and early diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of prostate cancer. Conclusions: Emerging prostate cancer biomarkers have the potential to guide clinical decision-making since they have the potential to detect the disease early, measure the risk of developing the disease and the risk of progression, provide accurate information of patient response to a specific treatment and are capable of informing clinicians about the likely outcome of a cancer diagnosis independent of the treatment received. Therefore, the future holds promise for personalised and targeted medicine from prevention to diagnosis and treatment that considers the individual patient’s variabilities in the management of prostate cancer.

Background: Radiotherapy is an effective and significant mode of definitive cancer treatment with well-established local tumour control success, especially in the treatment of localised tumours. Although, for metastatic disease, the role of radiotherapy has generally been limited to palliation of symptoms. In the treatment of metastatic diseases settings, the radiation therapy technique has always been confronted with the challenge of the simultaneous treatment of all of the various distant metastatic tumour sites, however, some recent evidence suggests that radiotherapy can potentially induce anticancer immune responses whose effectors potentially migrate to distant metastatic tumours to provoke their regression in cancer patients. Thus, unirradiated distant metastatic tumour sites can exhibit a delayed therapeutic response termed the abscopal effect. Materials and methods: This paper reports on a review of the abscopal effect, including its biological mechanism, the effect of radiation dose and fractionation regime and the timing of immunotherapy administration on radiotherapy-induced abscopal effect, the enhancement of radiotherapy-induced abscopal effects with immunotherapy, the effect of the location of the irradiated tumour and the radiotherapy of multiple tumour sites on the likelihood and effectiveness of inducing abscopal responses in the preclinical and clinical settings and also reports on some evidence of clinical observations in patients. Conclusions: Although abscopal effects of radiotherapy are still relatively rare in patients, it has gained a lot of interest due to recent development and use of immunotherapy strategies incorporating combinations of targeted immunomodulators and immune checkpoint blockade with radiation therapy. The enhancement of cancer immunotherapy could potentially enable the translation of the concept of abscopal effect into the clinics as a new strategy to induce therapeutically effective anti-tumour immune responses in cancer patients. The combination of radiotherapy and immunotherapy has the potential to expand the role of radiotherapy from a purely local tumour control treatment to play a significant role in advanced and metastatic tumour control and this could likely lead to a paradigm shift in the treatment of patients with metastatic cancer.