The use of sipuleucel-T prolonged overall survival among men with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. No effect on the time to disease progression was observed. (Funded by Dendreon; ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT00065442.)

SUMMARY Toward development of a precision medicine framework for metastatic, castration resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC), we established a multi-institutional clinical sequencing infrastructure to conduct prospective whole exome and transcriptome sequencing of bone or soft tissue tumor biopsies from a cohort of 150 mCRPC affected individuals. Aberrations of AR, ETS genes, TP53 and PTEN were frequent (40–60% of cases), with TP53 and AR alterations enriched in mCRPC compared to primary prostate cancer. We identified novel genomic alterations in PIK3CA/B, R-spondin, BRAF/RAF1, APC, β-catenin and ZBTB16/PLZF. Aberrations of BRCA2, BRCA1 and ATM were observed at substantially higher frequencies (19.3% overall) than seen in primary prostate cancers. 89% of affected individuals harbored a clinically actionable aberration including 62.7% with aberrations in AR, 65% in other cancer-related genes, and 8% with actionable pathogenic germline alterations. This cohort study provides evidence that clinical sequencing in mCRPC is feasible and could impact treatment decisions in significant numbers of affected individuals.

PCWG2 recommends increasing emphasis on time-to-event end points (ie, failure to progress) as decision aids in proceeding from phase II to phase III trials. Recommendations will evolve as data are generated on the utility of intermediate end points to predict clinical benefit.