Standardly collected clinical and pathological patient information has demonstrated only moderate ability to predict risk of biochemical recurrence BCR of prostate cancer in men undergoing salvage radiation therapy SRT for a rising PSA after radical prostatectomy RP. A total of men who underwent SRT at our institution were included. FOXA1 staining levels in primary tumor samples were detected using immunohistochemistry. FOXA1 staining percentage and intensity were measured and multiplied together to obtain a FOXA1 H-score range 0β12 which was our primary staining measure.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability: All relevant data are available in the paper and its Supporting Information files. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Each year in the United States approximately 75, men will undergo a radical prostatectomy RP for localized prostate cancer [ 1 ]. As such, the ability to accurately identify which men have the highest likelihood of responding to SRT represents a key clinical issue for the field.
Indeed, the ability to accurately forecast which men are likely to respond to SRT is important in order to optimize the selection of patients for this treatment, and to design better clinical trials to evaluate novel means of improving SRT efficacy. Related to this, a number of studies have been performed that attempt to identify specific characteristics that are associated with risk of BCR after SRT.
In an attempt to provide patients with individualized estimates of BCR risk that are tailored to their clinical and pathological characteristics, several large studies have proposed scoring algorithms that combine information from multiple prognostic factors [ 4 β 5 , 10 ]. However, the ability of these algorithms to stratify risk of BCR has considerable room for improvement; for example, a notable proportion of patients in the low BCR risks groups still experience BCR [ 4 β 5 , 8 β 10 ].
