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Proton Therapy for Prostate Cancer: Key Takeaways

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Proton Therapy for Prostate Cancer: Key Takeaways Proton Therapy vs. IMRT for Prostate Cancer: What the Evidence, the Guidelines, and the Courts Say Now Informed Prostate Cancer Support Group (IPCSG) Newsletter — Patient Education Series — July 2026 BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front):   For most men with newly diagnosed low- or intermediate-risk localized prostate cancer, the best available randomized evidence — the phase III PARTIQoL trial — shows that proton beam therapy (PBT) and intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) produce statistically indistinguishable outcomes: roughly 93–94% five-year progression-free survival with both, and no meaningful difference in bowel, urinary, sexual, or hormonal side effects. Proton therapy typically costs substantially more, and insurers have been repeatedly sued — and have paid multimillion-dollar settlements — over improper denials, even though the treatments perform similarly for the average patient. The more promising, still-e...
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Recent Developments in Prostate Cancer Care

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Recent Developments in Prostate Cancer | MedPage Today A roundup of the practice-shaping trial data reported between February and June 2026 — ASCO GU, AUA, and the ASCO Annual Meeting — prepared for the IPCSG community BLUF — Bottom Line Up Front Six studies reported in the first half of 2026 collectively push treatment earlier and make it more precisely targeted to tumor biology. For men with high-risk localized disease, adding a year of apalutamide around surgery cut the risk of metastasis by 20% (PROTEUS). For men with hormone-sensitive metastatic disease carrying DNA-repair gene mutations, adding a PARP inhibitor (talazoparib) to enzalutamide cut progression risk by roughly half (TALAPRO-3). Darolutamide continues to distinguish itself on two fronts — real-world-comparable efficacy against a historical ADT-alone benchmark (ARASEC) and measurably less cognitive decline than enzalutamide (ARACOG). In first-line metastatic castration-resistant disease with BRCA1...
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Why We Can't "Cure" Cancer

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Why We Can't "Cure" Cancer One Name, Many Diseases: How Genomics Is Rewriting Prostate Cancer Treatment Why "prostate cancer" is really a family of related illnesses — and what that means for your treatment plan Informed Prostate Cancer Support Group (IPCSG) Newsletter — Patient Education Series For most of medical history, prostate cancer was treated as one disease with one playbook: watch it, cut it out, radiate it, or starve it of testosterone. That playbook still matters. But over the last decade, something fundamental has shifted in how oncologists actually think about the disease sitting inside your prostate, or the one that has spread beyond it. The single word "prostate cancer" turns out to be a label covering a family of biologically distinct illnesses, each with its own genetic fingerprint, its own typical behavior, and — increasingly — its own matched treatment. This article walks through what that means in plain language, wha...
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The Algorithm in the Lab: AI is changing the pathologist job

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An Automated, Pathologist-free Gleason Grade Stratifies Disease-free Interval Comparably to Expert Grading from a Single Out-of-distribution Slide | medRxiv How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing the Way Your Biopsy Is Read Informed Prostate Cancer Support Group The Informed Patient July 2026  |  Educational Newsletter for Prostate Cancer Patients and Families AI tools that grade prostate cancer as well as expert pathologists are winning FDA approval, entering clinical guidelines, and moving toward routine use — and a new preprint study shows they can now do it without a pathologist in the room at all. By the IPCSG Educational Committee  |  Reviewed June 2026 If you have been diagnosed with prostate cancer, the single most important number in your medical record — your Gleason grade — was almost certainly assigned by a pathologist staring through a microscope (or these days, a computer screen) at thin slices of you...
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