Bipolar Androgen Therapy: An Alternative Approach for Prostate Cancer

at’s always a problem. What's almost certain is that there are cells that are resistant to what has been done. If there are still tumors, there is a small resistant population. Flooding with testosterone is punishing the adaptive strategy to low testosterone. At some point, it's going to go away. There's going to be a new strategy that's evolving.

Even cycling between supplying testosterone and depriving androgen will be selecting for androgen-independent cancer growth. There's no reason to be optimistic in the longer term. Prostate cancer is hard to eradicate. Strategy: What Should Bryce Do Next? Humans think linearly, but cancer is a nonlinear system.

It might seem that cycling on the hormone path will work, but it's very hard to predict. Bryce has put the tumor on the mat with BAT. He has a small cancer population, and small populations are vulnerable to extinction. But usually in evolution, the final nail in the coffin (extinction event) is not the same thing that drove the population down originally.

Should Bryce add a different therapy now when he has a small cancer population?

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“Bipolar Androgen Therapy” (Bryce Olson and Bob Gatenby) [#21] Meeting Notes SUMMARY KEYWORDS testosterone, androgen receptor, psa, patients, therapy, cancer, tumor, population, cycle, androgen, resistant, oncologist, point, cells, bryce, kill, line, liquid biopsy, stop, people SPEAKERS Jonathan Starr, Saed Sayad, Emma Shtivelman, Brad Power, Brian McCloskey, Bryce Olson, Rick Stanton, Ryon Graf, Bob Gatenby, Jim Ward Bryce Olson 00:03 Thanks for having me here.

I want to talk a little bit about B.A.T., Bipolar Androgen Therapy. When we did the hackathon for me in February of 2021, we all knew about B.A.T., but it wasn't even in the top five things for us to consider, partially because I think it's perceived as so dangerous. Throwing a bunch of testosterone into a guy is like putting gasoline on a fire.

We never considered it even though it was in the back of my mind. I want to tell you about my success story with this and then talk about why I think it deserves more attention and scale.

“Bipolar Androgen Therapy” (Bryce Olson and Bob Gatenby) [#21] Bryce Olson 01:09 Is it a game changer? I think it could be. What is B.A.T.? It's bipolar androgen therapy. It's designed to repeatedly shock the prostate cancer cells. You're alternating between a polar extreme of high and low testosterone levels.

n Therapy” (Bryce Olson and Bob Gatenby) [#21] Bryce Olson 01:09 Is it a game changer? I think it could be. What is B.A.T.? It's bipolar androgen therapy. It's designed to repeatedly shock the prostate cancer cells. You're alternating between a polar extreme of high and low testosterone levels.

As you can see on the graph on the right-hand side of this Johns Hopkins study, they were using 30-day cycles, or 28-day cycles. They would inject a patient with 400 milligrams of testosterone, and it would go up rapidly over the first two weeks or so, and then it would start to drop. This alternating pattern refers to supraphysiological T levels and then castrate levels. That's the gist of B.A.T.

“Bipolar Androgen Therapy” (Bryce Olson and Bob Gatenby) [#21] Bryce Olson To more easily understand this, I want to talk a little bit about baseball. Using analogies is always an easy way to think about things. Let's talk a little bit about the androgen receptor and androgens in general, and we'll use a baseball analogy.

Think of the androgen receptor which is on the cell surface of the prostate cancer cell. Your prostate cancer cells have androgen receptors on them, and they bind to androgens. Think of androgens as baseballs and androgen receptors as gloves. When you get an actual binding, that's when it folds in the nucleus and starts to rapidly divide.

That's what generates prostate cancer growth and PSA production. If you take away testosterone, which is what we do with anybody who's in stage four, you give them Lupron or Eligard, and you're taking away the baseballs, so essentially the gloves don't have anything to bind to initially.

It usually works for everybody for a little while and then cancer figures out how to grow despite having low levels of testosterone. The other way you can gum this up is using an anti-androgen like darolutamide, apalutamide, enzalutamide. Think of that as maybe throwing an orange into the glove. You gum up the receptor. That way a baseball can't bind into it. I'll say this again.

Think of androgen receptors as gloves and testosterone, essentially androgens, as baseballs because I'm going to use this analogy when I tell you about my story.

“Bipolar Androgen Therapy” (Bryce Olson and Bob Gatenby) [#21] Bryce Olson 04:54 Why was I a good candidate for this? I was heavily pretreated. This is my 13th line of therapy over the last eight and a half years. I've seen ADT since 2014, and I failed abiraterone. I've already been on first line and second line hormonal therapies, and I'm castrate resistant.

From a genomics perspective, you can see that I have AR copy number gain, so I have high levels of baseball gloves. When we took away the testosterone and then added abiraterone, that's when I saw the AR copy number gain show up.

gh levels of baseball gloves. When we took away the testosterone and then added abiraterone, that's when I saw the AR copy number gain show up. My cancer evolved, and it said, "Okay, not very much testosterone here, so we're going to add a ton of baseball gloves and try to scoop up any kind of baseballs that we can find." I have high levels of AR. I also have a P53 alteration.

In a Johns Hopkins study, there's a hypothesis that people with BRCA DNA damage alterations, P53 alterations, and AR copy number gain probably do better on B.A.T. I also shared ownership with my oncologist. Dr. Rana McKay hadn't done this before with anybody. She wasn't going to do this unless I came in and said I wanted to do it.

It was going to have to be a shared ownership between the patient and the oncologist because this is not being scaled right now. Johns Hopkins did it, Oliver Sartor has done a little bit of it, and maybe a couple of doctors across the country have done a little bit of this, but it's not being widely used. It's going to require that the patient be brave enough.

With testosterone in the equation, it can be like throwing gasoline on the fire. You must be brave enough to try it, and you must have a doctor that's willing to support it. I have a couple other quick notes that show how my treatment is different from the Johns Hopkins study. I'm doing this every six weeks, so I'm not cycling on 30 days.

I'm cycling on 45 days, every six weeks, and I'm adding pembrolizumab to it. The theory is that when you add testosterone in this type of a supra-physiological high-level way, you are turning on some of the immune function on the prostate cancer cell. I honestly don't know how much of my success is attributed to pembrolizumab versus testosterone, but I am using both.

“Bipolar Androgen Therapy” (Bryce Olson and Bob Gatenby) [#21] did have a major pain flare after the first dose. As I have talked about this, it's been all upsides. I'm living my best life right now on this treatment. What guy wouldn't want testosterone?

I'm loving this therapy, but I did have a major pain flare up that was excruciatingly painful for about three or four days after the first cycle. When you read the Johns Hopkins patient guide about this, they talk about it. They say if you have bone pain from cancer, they don't really want people with bone pain to do this.

They consider you symptomatic, and they don't really want you to do it because they think it's going to be really painful. And it was super painful, but it went away. I did a high dose of steroids for five days, and then it went away. I haven't had it come back in the second and third rounds. I just want to throw that little note of caution up there. Go to the next slide.