Declan and Renu as you haven't seen them before! They leave their cosy  podcast studio to do battle at the Australia & New Zealand Urogenital & Prostate Trials Group (ANZUP) Annual Scientific Meeting! The battleground is renal cancer, with Renu arguing in favour of adjuvant immunotherapy, and Declan arguing against. No holds barred. Who wins??! Tune in to find out.
Plus we chat with some of the ANZUP ASM international faculty including Alex Wyatt, Lauren Buffart, Ananya Choudhury, Andrea Apolo and Darren Feldman.
Congratulations to ASM Convenors Ben Tran and Renu Eapen, their Scientific Meeting and all at ANZUP  for putting on a terrific meeting. Thanks to ANZUP for allowing us to use footage from the debate, and to debate sponsors MSD who are also GU Cast Silver Partners. 

This episode best enjoyed on YouTube

This, our 100th episode, is a very special GU Cast, in which we remember the devastating 2011 Christchurch earthquake, which hit just as the Urological Society of Australia & New Zealand (USANZ) Annual Scientific Meeting (ASM) was kicking off in the city. 185 people lost their lives with many thousands injured, and with huge devastation across the region. Declan returned to Christchurch recently to put together this special episode, which includes some of his original footage from the time of the earthquake.
The highlight of this episode is a full replay of this year's Harry Harris Oration, delivered in February 2023 at the USANZ ASM in Melbourne. Dr Samuel "Harry" Harris, was one of the founding fathers of USANZ, and this annual oration in his name at the opening ceremony of our ASM is the most prestigious in the USANZ calendar. We invited the four inaugural recipients of the Christchurch Medal,
Urologists Dr Stephen Mark (Christchurch), Dr Lydia Johns-Putra (Ballarat), Dr Stuart Phillip (Brisbane), and Dr Julian Shah (London), to deliver the Harry Harris Oration by remembering Christchurch.  These four individuals were recognised for acts of extraordinary bravery in the rubble of Christchurch, risking their own lives to help victims in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. In this Harry Harris Oration, the Christchurch Medallists transport us back to the events of that fateful day, and reflect on what it means today. For those of us who were there, this was a very emotional and sombre occasion; for those who were not, this will be a chance to understand why the Christchurch Earthquake is such an important event in the history of our community.
We are very proud of this special GU Cast. We do hope that it means something to our audience around the world.

This episode best appreciated on YouTube

This is for hardcore PSMA aficionados!! This is the 7th of our ProsTIC/Prostate Cancer Foundation Global Webinars focussing on all things PSMA theranostics (you can find the rest in our back catalogue stretching back to April 2020). We peek into theranostics beyond what we currently have with beta-emitters like LuPSMA, into the tantalising world of alpha-PSMA theranostics.
Multidisciplinary researchers from the PCF-funded TACTICAL project give a sneak into current and future work. Hear from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center experts Prof Mike Morris, Dr Lisa Bodei and Dr Jason Lewis about very exciting developments in DLL3 imaging and theranostics in neuroendocrine prostate cancer;  Dr Marwa Rahimi (Radiochemist at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre) and David Pattison (Nuclear Medicine Physician, Royal Brisbane Hospital), overview Lead-212 targeted alpha therapy; and Dr Megan Crumbaker (Medical Oncologist (St Vincent's Hoapital, Sydney) who discusses Actinium-225 clinical data. Plus Dr James Buteau (Nuclear Medicine Physician, Peter Mac) on the Q&A
Co-hosted by Declan Murphy and Michael Hofman from the GU Cast studio in Melbourne. along with Dr Howard Soule and Dr Andrea Miyahira from the PCF in California. Even better as a video podcast 

Dr Sima Porten from the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), was in Melbourne this week for the ANZUP Annual Scientific Meeting (more from that in an upcoming episode), so she popped into the GU Cast studio to chat with Renu and Declan. Renu of course spent a year with Sima and colleagues doing Fellowship training in GU Oncology so she was very happy to have her good friend and mentor in town.
Sima is a very highly regarded expert in bladder cancer and delivered some great talks on this topic to the ANZUP ASM this week. We chat with her about strategies to help patients avoid cystectomy (bladder removal) despite refractory high-grade bladder cancer. We also chat about avoiding cystectomy in muscle-invasive bladder cancer, and her thoughts on open vs robotic surgery from her perspective as a very high-volume bladder cancer surgeon.

Even better when watched on YouTube 

Two cracking bladder cancer studies to discuss on GU Cast today (in our brand new GU Cast studio)! We are joined by Dr Sia Daneshmand, Urologist and Director of Urologic Oncology at the University of Southern California, who presented the headline-making Tar-200/SunRIse-1 study at the recent Annual Meeting of the American Urological Association. Not sure what a urological pretzel is and how it can help patients with high-grade non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer? Sia explains all! 

He was also an investigator on the SWOG 1011 trial presented at the ASCO Annual Meeting recently by Dr Seth Lerner. A practice-changing randomised trial of standard vs extended pelvic lymph node dissection for patents with invasive bladder cancer. 

These are very significant papers and we really enjoyed having Sia on GU Cast to discuss. 

Even better on YouTube when you can check out our new studio!

Stereotactic Ablative Body Radiotherapy (SABR) has been a great tool for managing low volume metastatic prostate cancer for a few years now. One or two visits to the radiation centre, highly targeted, minimal side-effects. So could it be used to treat the primary prostate cancer itself with similar success?
Today we have top SABR experts Dr Alison Tree (Royal Marsden Hospital, London), and Associate Professor Shankar SIva (Peter Mac, Melbourne) in the GU Cast studio, and Dr Gerard Morton on Zoom from Sunnybrook Cancer Centre in Toronto. Alison talks through the most recent update from the PACE-B study and we ask which technology is best for prostate cancer.

Full video podcast available on our YouTube channel 

With approvals and reimbursement increasing all the time for the use of AR pathway inhibitors (ARPIs) in metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer (mHSPC), we chat today about how front-line clinicians need to make sure we are making the most of these opportunities for our patients. Urologists in particular are the clinicians who most frequently diagnose men with metastatic prostate cancer, and who therefore need to be aware of the changing opportunities to improve outcomes for our patients.
Today in this Themed Episode supported by our Gold Partner, Janssen, we chat with Professor Fred Saad, Chair and Professor of Urology at the University of Montreal, who says it is "unethical to treat newly diagnosed metastatic prostate cancer with ADT alone"! We are also joined by Dr Ciara Conduit, Medical Oncologist at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, who helps us understand management options for these patients.

Also available as a video podcast on our YouTube channel 

So if you haven't seen all the fuss about ChatGPT on social media in the past two weeks, then imagine this. You have to write a 500 word introduction to an article on adjuvant therapy following renal cancer surgery, you are a week past deadline and  you have writer's block. Or it's your thankless task to organise next year's on-call roster for your Department. Or your year 11 son has asked you to explain Max Planck’s Determination of the Avogadro Constant.
Well fear not, ChatGPT is here to save the day!! Just type in the request, and this quite remarkable AI tool will spew out the answer, with quite incredible literacy (including citations), and even empathy and humour. Just sensational. It will even write code to help you build that app you always wanted but had no idea how to program. Need a patient-friendly explanation of a new trial? Or maybe a big grant application. Just type in your request, and hey presto, ChatGPT does the rest. In seconds. For free!
Today we have invited some great guests to discuss this topic. Dr Anobel Odisho (UCSF) has been all over this for years, and has posted some fantastic tweets about this. Communications guru Todd Morgan (University of Michigan) and urology trainee Jonathan O'Brien (who is doing research on AI in penile cancer) pitch in with their thoughts. And we are also joined by Liam Mannix, National Science Reporter with leading Australian broadsheets The Age and Sydney Morning Herald.

Even better on our Youtube channel

Links:
ChatGPT through Open AI
Liam Mannix's article in The Age
David Canes excellent sub-stack overview

Twitter links
Anobel Odisho
Todd Morgan
Liam Mannix
Jonathan O'Brien
David Canes

The annual Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCF) Retreat is in its 29th year, and is the showpiece event of the PCF's incredible research program. Each year, PCF investigators from around the world gather in California to share their work and interact together. Fair to say it has developed a legendary status among the prostate cancer community across the globe.
GU Cast's Dr Renu Eapen has recently received a PCF Young Investigator Award to support her PhD into immunological aspects of prostate cancer in patients receiving Lu-PSMA on the LuTectomy trial, so she was excited to travel to Carlsbad (CA) to attend this year's PCF Retreat. She joined up with fellow Young Investigator Dr Edmond Kwan to bring us a few highlights from this year's meeting. Lots of familiar faces in there! Watch out for Felix Feng, Misha Beltran, Howard Soule, Andrea Miyahira, Todd Morgan, Chuck Ryan, Tyler Seibert, Alicia Morgans, Neeraj Agarwal, Gina Carithers and many more.

Even better on our Youtube channel

Links:
The PCF
Urotoday 

Is grade group 1 (Gleason 6 in old money) really prostate cancer? Wouldn't life be a little easier for patients (and the rest of the world) if we could somehow remove the label "cancer" from this relatively indolent condition??
Well this decade-old discussion seems to have developed a lot of momentum in the past year, driven by urologists like Dr Scott Eggener (University of Chicago) and Dr Matt Cooperberg (University of California San Francisco), who with others have written some nice articles to argue the case for "re-branding" grade group 1 as a non-cancer. This would certainly deal with the lingering issue of over-treatment of low-risk prostate cancer which persists to a variable extent around the world.
Alas, it's not so simple. Expert GU pathologists like Dr Eva Comperat (University of Vienna) point out that this is cancer. Period. If the clinical community have an issue with over-treatment, then we should deal with this another ways, rather than ask for the impossible.
Today we thrash this out with Scott, Matt and Eva. A great listen/watch. And maybe a way forward...

Even better on our YouTube channel