Karim Fizazi

The randomised proof for PARP inhibition in BRCA-altered prostate cancer, and the clearest evidence that the homologous recombination repair gene list should not be used as a single yes-or-no test. ATM-altered disease needs a different answer, and does not yet have one.

Men with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer that has progressed after hormonal therapy and chemotherapy, and whose tumours show PSMA on a PET scan, can now receive lutetium-PSMA, which extends life, controls pain and is usually better tolerated than further chemotherapy. It has established a new treatment class in which a scan decides who gets the matching radioactive drug, and it is now being tested earlier in the disease (PSMAfore, PSMAddition).

The answer to a question three individual trials could not answer on their own, and the reason docetaxel with androgen deprivation became standard for metastatic hormone-sensitive disease. It also stopped a widely used bone drug being credited with a survival effect it does not have.

The trial that made an androgen receptor inhibitor the usual first treatment for castration-resistant prostate cancer, and that delayed chemotherapy by a long margin for most men. Its effect sizes are why later trials in this setting are judged against a hazard ratio near 0.7 for survival.

A negative trial that was later overturned, and a standing argument for pooling individual trials rather than acting on the first one to report. It is also the reason the distinction between high-volume and low-volume metastatic disease is written into guidelines.

An oral drug that works after chemotherapy has failed, in a disease where the previous option was more chemotherapy. Together with abiraterone it moved castration-resistant prostate cancer from a chemotherapy disease to a hormonal one, and set up the sequencing questions the field is still arguing about.