Dr. Hope on the Effectiveness of 68Ga-PSMA-11 PET in Prostate Cancer

Thomas A. Hope, MD, an associate professor of radiology and director of molecular therapy for the Molecular Imaging and Therapeutics Clinical Section of the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at the University of California, San Francisco, discusses the positive findings from a phase 3 imaging study, which utilized 68Ga-PSMA-11 PET in the detection of pelvic nodal metastasis (N1) in men with intermediate- or high-risk prostate cancer.

Topline results from the multicenter, single-arm, open-label, prospective, clinical study, which were presented at the 2020 ASCO Virtual Scientific Program, focused on the sensitivity and specificity of 68Ga-PSMA-11 PET in the detection of N1 disease compared with pelvic lymph node dissection histopathology prior to radical prostatectomy, says Hope.

A total of 277 patients underwent radical prostatectomy; of those, 75 patients (27%) had N1 disease per histopathology at the time of surgery. Among the 75 patients, 30 tested positive through the PSMA PET; 10 were found to be false positives that were negative on pathology, but positive on PSMA. These findings translated to a sensitivity of 40% and a specificity of 95%, concludes Hope.