Pulling Back the Layers of Penile Cancer

In this episode of the “CURE Talks Cancer” podcast, we spoke with Dr. Guru Sonpavde about the current landscape of penile cancer.

An extremely rare disease, penile cancer, according to estimates from the American Cancer Society, will affect approximately 2,200 men in 2020 in the United States.

Sonpavde, director of the Bladder Cancer Program at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, provides insight into this rare cancer and discusses why it’s difficult to treat patients with metastatic disease, as well as why research in this field is severely lacking.

“It’s tough, logistically, to open a trial globally for a rare cancer, because what it means is you really have to open it in a lot of sites, a lot of institutions, to capture all these patients,” said Sonpavde in an interview with CURE®. “So, that obviously raises the issue of costs. Can you really open a trial in a thousand institutions that will only enroll a small number of patients?”