Predicting response to chemotherapy for prostate cancer and other stories . . .

Keeping up with every advance in cancer biochemistry and genomics is beyond the capacity of humans and even of Minerva. But disseminated prostate cancer kills many men every year, and it’s good to see incremental progress through better understanding of androgen receptor behaviour. A new study shows that the measurement of androgen receptor splice variant 7 (AR-V7) in circulating tumour cells can predict which men with castration resistant prostate cancer are most likely to respond to treatment with chemotherapy rather than enzalutamide or abiraterone (JAMA Oncology 2015, doi:10.1001/jamaoncol.2015.1341).

It’s fracking, but done through an arthroscope. Some orthopaedic surgeons have taken to treating full thickness chondral damage in the hip by creating microfractures. A study compares patient reported outcomes in patients who had the procedure with those in patients who had hip arthroscopy …