Focal therapy for prostate cancer: a potential strategy to address the problem of overtreatment

Focal therapy for localized prostate cancer involves destroying the cancer focus in order to offer patients the potential of combining cancer control with minimal side-effects. Current standard of care involves either active surveillance or radical therapy. Neither of these is ideal. Active surveillance carries a risk of under- treatment, with psychological morbidity as a result of anxiety and is associated with side-effects due to repeated biopsies, although radical therapy is the gold standard for curative treatment. With the proportion of unifocal or unilateral disease among men with low-risk disease rising, a focal approach could avoid both under and over-treatment. With the advent of improved accuracy for cancer localization provided by multiparametric MRI and new biopsy strategies such as transperineal mapping biopsies, ablative modalities such as cryotherapy, high intensity focused ultrasound, photodynamic therapy and radio-interstitial tumour ablation make focal treatments a real possibility.