By Joyce Kryszak
Buffalo, NY – The Roswell Park Cancer Institute is hosting a conference in Niagara Falls on the future of Prostate Cancer research. The three-day event, which began Thursday, features some of the nation's leading researchers.
It's not a subject most men are eager to talk about. Prostate Cancer is highly personal and it's scary.
Sixteen out of every one hundred men will be diagnosed with the disease. And it is the second leading cause of death among men.
Doctor Donald Coffey is a nationally recognized researcher from Johns Hopkins Hospital.
He said men need to start dealing with cancer more like women do.
"That's always been a problem with males as opposed to females. Females work doing all sorts of support groups and things for breast cancer, but men are more reluctant to talk about their problems. It's just a male situation in which men don't like to show pain or weakness or anything. This is not that sort of thing. It's a disease and a problem and can be taken care of if gotten early," said Coffey.
And that's where institutions such as Roswell Park come in.
Researchers there discovered the Prostate Specific Antigen or PSA test. Coffey said it led the way in identifying markers to help diagnose prostate cancer.
Now he said that research is being taken even farther. Coffey said another marker, the PSMA is making treatment more targeted and effective - and less damaging.
"We'll hear at this meeting how people getting smart bombs to home on these markers on prostate cancer," said Coffey. "It's much like the second world war when we bombed everything and did the whole cities and things and that's the way most the cancer chemotherapy been working. But now, with these smart bombs that only hit the cancer cells things will improve dramatically. there will be many talks there about how to do these things."
Presentations by Coffey and nearly two dozen scientists continue Friday and Saturday at the Niagara Falls Conference Center.