Focal therapy: patients, interventions, and outcomes--a report from a consensus meeting

Focal therapy as a treatment option for localized prostate cancer (PCa) is an increasingly popular and rapidly evolving field.

To gather expert opinion on patient selection, interventions, and meaningful outcome measures for focal therapy in clinical practice and trial design.

Fifteen experts in focal therapy followed a modified two-stage RAND/University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Appropriateness Methodology process. All participants independently scored 246 statements prior to rescoring at a face-to-face meeting. The meeting occurred in June 2013 at the Royal Society of Medicine, London, supported by the Wellcome Trust and the UK Department of Health.

Agreement, disagreement, or uncertainty were calculated as the median panel score. Consensus was derived from the interpercentile range adjusted for symmetry level.

Of 246 statements, 154 (63%) reached consensus. Items of agreement included the following: patients with intermediate risk and patients with unifocal and multifocal PCa are eligible for focal treatment; magnetic resonance imaging-targeted or template-mapping biopsy should be used to plan treatment; planned treatment margins should be 5mm from the known tumor; prostate volume or age should not be a primary determinant of eligibility; foci of indolent cancer can be left untreated when treating the dominant index lesion; histologic outcomes should be defined by targeted biopsy at 1 yr; residual disease in the treated area of ≤3 mm of Gleason 3+3 did not need further treatment; and focal retreatment rates of ≤20% should be considered clinically acceptable but subsequent whole-gland therapy deemed a failure of focal therapy. All statements are expert opinion and therefore constitute level 5 evidence and may not reflect wider clinical consensus.

The landscape of PCa treatment is rapidly evolving with new treatment technologies. This consensus meeting provides guidance to clinicians on current expert thinking in the field of focal therapy.

In this report we present expert opinion on patient selection, interventions, and meaningful outcomes for clinicians working in focal therapy for prostate cancer.