Research Profile: Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Md.

March 16, 2009 -- I am Dr. Robert Getzenberg. I'm a professor of urology, oncology and pharmacology here at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and I also direct prostate cancer research here at Johns Hopkins. We are working on several areas that are of direct important to prostate cancer. The first is to find better markers for prostate cancer.

As we mentioned, PSA, although it's been used for 25 years and really been, revolutionized prostate cancer, it's not perfect. It's wrong 80 percent of the time and we need to find more accurate markers of prostate cancer. So we have a new blood test we've been working on that we think will be more accurate at finding who really has prostate cancer, but more importantly who has the form of prostate cancer that has the highest chance of killing you.

Another area we're working on is to find new treatments. Clearly we have not had the impact in cancer research as we'd like to have, as far as really finding new approaches to treat individuals with cancer, particularly aggressive or metastatic cancer. So we're thinking outside the box and using heat as a new approach to cancer, not as a way to kill cancer, but to make current agents like chemotherapy and radiation therapy work better.