The standard treatment for ovarian serous carcinoma is maximum debulking surgery and platinum‑based chemotherapy. Despite the high response rate for chemotherapy, the majority of patients will be resistant to first‑line agents and the prognosis for these patients is particularly poor. Currently there are no reliable methods to determine or predict platinum resistance. Uncoupling protein 2 (UCP2) is widely expressed in cancer cells and regulates the production of mitochondrial reactive oxygen species (ROS). A reduction in ROS is associated with carcinogenesis and chemoresistance. Downregulation of UCP2 significantly causes increased cell death following chemotherapy. The present study investigated the association between UCP2 expression and platinum sensitivity. The study included 54 patients with ovarian serous carcinoma (FIGO stages III and IV) who were treated at Osaka City University Hospital between January 2005 and December 2012. Patients were divided into a platinum‑sensitive group (n=27) and platinum‑resistant group (n=27) based on the platinum‑free interval, which was calculated from the time of last platinum administration to the time of recurrence. UCP2 expression in human ovarian serous carcinoma cells was inhibited by genipin, and changes in carboplatin sensitivity were examined. The UCP2 weighted score was lower in the platinum‑sensitive group than in the platinum resistant‑group (P=0.005). In addition, patients in the low UCP2 expression group were more sensitive to platinum‑based chemotherapy than those in the high UCP2 expression group (P=0.001). Sensitivity to carboplatin was significantly increased when UCP2 was inhibited in human ovarian serous carcinoma cells in vitro. UCP2 expression may be a predictive marker of the efficacy of platinum‑based chemotherapy for patients with ovarian serous carcinoma.

Whole-gland therapy for prostate cancer, which might cause more harm than no therapy (observation or active surveillance), might be a overtreatment. In order to avoid overtreatment as well as undertreatment of localize prostate cancer, novel strategy of organ-preserving therapies have been developed to achieve both cancer control and functional preservation. For the therapeutic techniques, microwave ablation would be an option for lesion-targeted focal therapy to eradicate biopsy-proven cancer lesion with its safety margin. Following our recent pilot clinical study of lesion-targeted focal cryotherapy, prospective clinical trial was designed to investigate the safety and therapeutic effects of lesion-targeted microwave therapy for localized prostate cancer. This is a single-center, phase I, clinical study to evaluate primarily the safety of lesion-targeted focal microwave treatment for prostate cancer. Patients with a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-visible, MR-ultrasound image-fusion targeted biopsy-proven clinically significant cancer will be enrolled. The target sample size is 5. Transrectal ultrasound-guided focal microwave ablation will be performed under general anesthesia. The primary endpoint is adverse events after microwave focal therapy. Secondary endpoint includes to assess both cancer control and quality of life (functional preservation). This single-center, phase I, clinical study aims to evaluate the safety and efficacy of lesion-targeted focal microwave treatment for prostate cancer. The importance of this clinical trial is that it may establish new treatment for prostate cancer. This study was registered with Japan Registry of Clinical Trials (jRCTs052190026).

Although recent clinical trials of new therapeutic agents for metastatic urothelial carcinoma have shown prolonged overall survival, there are few real-world evidence. To assess the impact of new therapeutic agents, we performed retrospective analysis for consecutive 158 metastatic urothelial carcinoma patients who performed systemic therapy in our institution between May 2008 and August 2023. We defined a period from May 2008 to December 2017, when pembrolizumab was first introduced to the clinical setting in the new therapeutic agents for metastatic urothelial carcinoma in Japan, as “pre new drug era” and a period from January 2018 to August 2023 as “post new drug era”. We compared overall survival between pre- and post- new drug era using Kaplan–Meier method with log rank test. Median overall survival of pre- and post- new drug era were 14.5 months (95% confidence intervals: 11.6–16.7) and 23.1 months (95% confidence intervals: 14.5-NA), respectively (p < 0.001). Five-year survival rate of pre- and post- new drug era was 7.0% (95% confidence intervals: 2.3–15.3) and 36.3% (95% confidence intervals: 21.4–51.5), respectively. Multivariable Cox proportional hazards regression analysis of factors associated with overall survival showed that enfortumab vedotin administration, administration of second-line or more systemic therapy, best overall response of SD, PR and CR in first-line systemic therapy, higher serum albumin and lower CRP were factors for overall survival prolongation. Introduction of new therapeutic agents for metastatic urothelial carcinoma contributed to the improvement of overall survival in comparison with the era without these agents.