GU Cast | Urology Podcast

One of our most popular podcasts every year is when we chat with EAU Guideline gurus Derya Tilki and Gianluca Giannarini about the latest updates to the EAU Prostate Cancer Guideline. It is a 250 word document which is updated in March every year and changes are eagerly awaited around the world. 
We catch up with Derya (Vice Chair of the Prostate Cancer Guidleine Committee) in person in Melbourne, and with Gianluca (Vice-Chair of the EAU Guideline Office) online, about the latest updates. We also chat with Gianluca about the work of the Guideline Dissemination Committee which he has C...

Democracy in action! This month's GU Cast Journal Club papers were chosen by an audience vote at our GU Cast Live Event at EAU in London.
Therefore today we focus on first, the landmark proPSMA paper which established the superior accuracy of PSMA PET/CT for staging unfavourable intermediate and high-risk prostate cancer (Lancet 2020). Then for something completely different, we dig out a paper called "Penile fractures - the merry price of Christmas", published in BJUI 2020. Thanks very much to our live audience for this one!

We are delighted to welcome back our GU Cast Journal...

The trial they said would never be done! Huge congrats to the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology who have recently opened the ASPIRE trial, a phase III randomised trial of ADT + apalutamide (doublet), vs ADT + apalutamide + docetaxel chemotherapy (triplet) for men with mHSPC. 1200 men will be recruited from more than 300 sites across the US with many sites already open and recruiting. This is the key trial which will answer the question of whether there is an overall survival benefit of adding chemo to the ADT/ARPI doublet which we all agree is standard of care.
We chat...

Our biggest live show to date! Taking to the huge eUro 2 auditorium at this month's EAU Annual Meeting in London, Declan and Renu bring you a fast-paced, high-energy session packed with favourite guests, controversial topics, behind-the-scenes stories, and lots of great giveaways, all boosted by having hundreds of our loyal supporters there in the audience with us.

Huge thanks to Maarten Albersen and all at the EAU Scientific Office for this invitation, and to everyone at MediAVentures, M-Events, Congress Consultants, Soma Studios and CMDM Media for helping us put it together. And to our own team including...

Big day at the EAU Annual Meeting n London today, as our colleague Dr James Buteau (Nuclear Medicine Physician, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Melbourne), reads out the PRIMARY 2 RCT at the Practice-Changing Plenary in London. Plus a simultaneous publication in Lancet Oncology. Big news for the early detection of prostate cancer, especially for patients with normal or equivocal MRI scans. 

Declan Murphy and Renu Eapen are joined by James and senior author, Prof Louise Emmett (St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney), to discuss the journey from our first PSMA PET/CT scans in 2014, to the proPSMA trial, the PRIMARY t...

We bring you highlights from a fantastic two day meeting at the ORSI Academy in Belgium, focussing on the hot topic of intra-operative margin assessment (IOMA), especially during prostate cancer surgery. Following on from the publication of the Neurosafe Proof RCT last year, there has been a surge in interest in new technologies to facilitate IOMA, in particular the Histolog confocal laser microscope (Samantree Medical).
Day one consisted of a Delphi consensus meeting with a gathering of world-leading experts in IOMA, discussing how novel technologies like Histolog can be used to assess surgical margins in real time, and...

Yes that's right, our great APCCC giveaway is back! We are sending three lucky winners to Lugano to attend the world's best prostate cancer meeting - the Advanced Prostate Cancer Consensus Conference. Just send us a 60 second video to enter.
Closing date Fri 13th June 9pm GMT. Winners will be announced at the GU Cast Live Event at the EAU in London on Sun 15th March 2026.
Full details at gucast.org

Check out APCCC at apccc.org

Welcome to Episode 6 of our monthly GU Cast Journal Club! Two important papers in upper tract urothelial cancer (the POUT trial of adjuvant chemo post nephro-ureterectomy), and metastatic testicular cancer (the SEMS trial of surgery for early metastatic seminoma).

We are delighted to welcome back our GU Cast Journal Club Editors, Dr Carlos Delgado (Melbourne, AUS), and Dr Elena Berg (Munich, GER), along with main GU Cast Hosts, Renu Eapen and Declan Murphy. No prostate cancer today, and go easy on Declan he is struggling with man flu!

Links to papers below:
1. Adjuvant chemotherapy...

It is the eve of the USANZ ASM here in Melbourne (which Renu is Convening!), and some of the 27 International guests are already into town. So we grabbed Anders Bjartell (Lund University/University Hospital Malmo, SWE), for a sit down chat in studio. Anders has been a huge name in prostate cancer research in Europe for the past couple of decades, including as a senior investigator on TITAN. so we decided to pick his brain on three topical areas in prostate cancer:
1. ADT/ARPI doublets in mHSPC - can we adopt an intermittent approach before the trials read...

Giant bladder cancer paper in NEJM this week with the highly anticipated results of the perioperative EV-Pembro trial (EV-303 / KN-905). Already we can say this is a landmark publicaion in bladder cancer that will change practice and even challenge the role of cystectomy (maybe)! 
Declan Murphy and Renu Eapen caught up with first author Christof Vulsteke (Integrated Cancer Centre, Ghent, BEL) when we were at ESMO Asia recently and had a chat about this work and how it will change practice. 

This is a Themed Podcast supported by our Platinum Partner, Astellas. 

E...

Following on from last week's episode on "toxicity", we are delighted today to welcome back two great friends of GU Cast from the world of radiation oncology - ASTRO President Dr Neha Vapiwala (University of Pennsylvania), and European Urology Associate Editor, Dr Amar Kishan (University of California, Los Angeles). We go through Amar and Neha's letter to the editor following the recent paper in Eur Urol Oncol from the IRRADIATE registry, and  dive into the opportunities we have working in multidisciplinary teams to look after our prostate cancer patients. Most enjoyable!

Even better on o...

In case you missed it, or you've already abandoned Twitter (memo to self - must do that ourselves!), we witnessed some pretty toxic stuff over there in the past couple of weeks. Vile personal attacks, calls for resignations, accusations of nefarious behaviour etc etc, mostly triggered by an AI-generated infographic attempting to illustarte a recent paper in European Urology Oncology. 
We chat with first author Dr Riccardo Bertolo (University of Verona, ITA), about his first-hand experience of twitter toxicity, his take on that terrible infographic, and ,most importantly, we discuss the paper which he and his colleagues published o...

Happy New Year and welcome to Episode 5 of our monthly GU Cast Journal Club! Today we focus on two classic papers in non-invasive bladder cancer and metastatic prostate cancer. The Lamm RCT of maintenance BCG is a landmark trial for all sorts of reasons, published in J Urol in 2000. And the CHAARTED paper of chemohormonal therapy is the landmark trial of combination therapy in mHSPC, published in NEJM in 2015.

We are delighted to welcome back our GU Cast Journal Club Editors, Dr Carlos Delgado (Melbourne, AUS), and Dr Elena Berg (Munich, GER), along with main GU Cast...

Another of our special Themed Podcasts focussed on prostate cancer in China, supported by our Gold Partner, Bayer. We are joined as ever by our China Editor, Dr Yao Zhu (Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Centre), and also special guest Dr Yige Bao (SCU Xiamen Hospital). Not only do we learn about pandas in West China, but also some great highlights from the recent ESMO Annual Meeting in Berlin! Hosted as ever by Dr Renu Eapen and Prof Declan Murphy

Even better on our YouTube channel 

Episode 4 of our monthly GU Cast Journal Club and today we focus on two important papers in prostate cancer diagnostics and bladder cancer surgery. The PRECISION NEJM paper 2018 is a landmark publication which defined the role of mpMRI in early detection, and changed practice in many countries. The EB-StaR trial should also change practice after its European Urology 2024 publication, but has it??!

We are delighted to welcome back our GU Cast Journal Club Editors, Dr Carlos Delgado (Melbourne, AUS), and Dr Elena Berg (Munich, GER), along with main GU Cast Hosts, Renu Eapen and Declan Murphy. A...

An exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the world-famous ORSI Academy in Belgium! Declan and Renu travelled to this remarkable facility just outside Ghent in Belgium, jammed full of tens of millions of dollars worth of robotic surgery technology from the world's top providers - Intuitive Surgical, Medtronic, Microport and more. Every day, surgeons from all around the world are getting hands-on experience using the latest robotic surgery technology in an array of training environments. Plus ORSI Academy hosts many academic programs, live surgery events, telesurgery demonstrations, and is actually expanding to do even more! 
We get a superb tour o...

World-renowned sexual health expert, Dr Chris Nelson, Chief of Psychology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre, joins us in studio to run through the new Movember-supported "Guidelines for Sexual Health Care for Prostate Cancer Patients". A really helpful overview and structure for anyone working in this field, and for patients and their loved ones. Chris shares his 20-plus years of experience working in this field at one of the world's premier prostate cancer centres.

Even better on our YouTube channel 

Links:
Movember Sexual Health Guidelines

We recently hosted another live webinar for our Gold Partners, Mundipharma,  this time asking the question, "Is high-risk BCR actually metastatic prostate cancer??". It's a reasonable question! This podcast was anchored from the GU Cast studio in Melbourne by usual hosts, Renu Eapen and Declan Murphy, joined in person by Andrew Loblaw, radiation oncologist from Toronto, and online by medical oncologist Jeff Goh in Brisbane.

Best enjoyed on our YouTube channel if you want to check out the slides. 

Runsheet:

Dr Amar Kishan (Radiation Oncologist, UCLA, USA), made lots of headlines recently when he presented data from the phase II randomised LUNAR trial of SABR +/- LuPSMA in patients with oligometastatic prostate cancer. So we were very happy when he turned up in Melbourne recently and popped into the GU Cast studio for a chat. We discuss metastasis-directed therapy and bring up our favourite Pokemet analogies, and ask should we not just be offering these patients and ADT/ARPI doublet?! 

Regular hosts Declan Murphy and Renu Eapen, also joined by Prof Wee Ong, Radiation Oncologist at Alfred H...

Fun today as we go to the OR to test drive some high-fidelity radical prostatectomy models and chat with the team behind UroTrainer - world leaders in urologic simulation. Urologists Gonzalo Vitagliano and Maxi Ringa join us from Buenos Aries to tell us all about UroTrainer and why they have worked hard to create these beautiful models for trainees to improve their skills in minimally-invasive prostate and kidney surgery. 

They also tell us about their range of hands-on courses around the world and their innovative remote laparoscopic training courses so trainees can do training from home w...

One of our favourite meetings of the year! The EAU Robotic Urology Section (ERUS) Annual Meeting took place in London recently and was an unashamed exposition of robotic surgery in urology. More than 30 amazing live surgeries, and some fantastic plenary sessions focussing on technical aspects. Multiple different robots, and spectacular telesurgery with surgeons sitting in London, performing robotic surgery up to 8000km away! 

Join Host Declan Murphy to get a flavour of this year's meeting, and to hear from many of the surgeons involved.

With thanks to our Silver Partners, Device Technologies. 

Episode 3 of our monthly GU Cast Journal Club and today we focus on one classic paper in Urology, and one from recent times - the ERSPC randomised trial of screening in prostate cancer, and the NIAGARA trial evaluating peri-operative immunotherapy in muscle-invasive bladder cancer. 

We are delighted to welcome back our GU Cast Journal Club Editors, Dr Carlos Delgado (Melbourne, AUS), and Dr Elena Berg (Munich, GER), along with main GU Cast Hosts, Renu Eapen and Declan Murphy. Watch out for Declan getting all misty-eyed recalling when the ERSPC was published back in 2009 (the rest of t...

Another of our deep-in-the-weeds theranostic webinars in conjunction with our friends at ProsTiC, and the Prostate Cancer Foundation. This one focussed on Terbium-161, a very exciting new option in metastatic prostate cancer. 
Your hosts are Dr Renu Eapen and Professor Michael Hofman, with Dr Howard Soule and Dr Andrea Miyahira from the Prostate Cancer Foundation. Special guests include Dr James Buteau (Peter Mac, Melbourne, Australia), Dr Alin Chirindel (Universitätsspital Basel), Prof Dr Samer Ezziddin (Saarland University Hospital, Germany) and Prof. Cristina Müller (Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland)

Is Terbium-161 superior to Lutetium-177? You'll hear about the...

Hot off the press in the Presidential Plenary at #ESMO25, we chat with Dr Scott Tagawa (Weill-Cornell, USA) about the positive data he just presented from the PSMAddition trial. This is an eagerly awaited phase III randmosied trial of patients with mHSPC, to see if the addition of six cycles of Lu-PSMA-617 to a control arm of ADT and an ARPI, could improve rPFS and other endpoints. We are also joined in the studio by Prof Michael Hofman (Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, AUS), co-PI of the UpFront PSMA trial which also explored a similar concept, plus some comments from...

Never heard of Common Sense Oncology?? Well if you enjoy this podcast then we think you will might find the Common Sense Oncology (CSO) movement to be very interesting indeed!

Declan Murphy caught up recently with Dr Bishal Gyawali, Medical Oncologist at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, to talk about CSO which he co-founded in 2023. They are on a mission to ensure that cancer care and innovation, should focus on results that are meaningful to patients (eg survival, quality of life, equity), rather than just regulatory approval, commercial success, or statistical endpoints. "Outcomes that matter", is their battle...

The Urological Association of Asia (UAA) Annual Meeting is always a great cultural event with a focus on the local community. And Taipei certainly put on a great show! Lots of fantastic entertainment and great local cuisine, plus of course a great scientific program, with a focus on AI, single port robotic surgery, novel robot systems, and lots more across the breadth of Urology.

Join hosts Renu Eapen and Declan Murphy, who bring you a great flavour of UAA in Taipei, speaking to many local and international guests. 

Even better on our YouTube channel

They started off by introducing themselves as The Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse - what could possibly go wrong!! Declan couldn't resist the opportunity to invite three very eminent radiation oncologists into the studio when they all happened to be in Melbourne, even if he was particularly outnumbered while Renu was away! Vedang Murthy (Tata Memorial, India), Andrew Loblaw (Sunnybrook Hospital, Canada), and Sarat Chander (Peter Mac, Melbourne) are all highly specialised in prostate radiation, so Declan invited them into the GU Cast studio to pick their brains on three big areas in prostate radiation:
1. Hypofractionation in 2025...

We never need an excuse to visit Sydney, and for sure when one of our favourite meetings of the year is in the Harbourside City then count us in! The Annual Meeting of ANZUP is something we try and get to every year and have really enjoyed bringing you highlights. This year we catch up with some international faculty including Roger Li (Moffitt Cancer Centre, USA), ANZUP Prostate Cancer Committee bosses Lisa Horvath (Chris O'Brien Lifehouse) and Jarad Martin (Genesis Care), Dickon Hayne (Fiona Stanley Hospital) regarding his NMICB RCT, and Bernie Reilly (Prostate CAncer Foundation of Australia) about...

Episode 2 of our monthly GU Cast Journal Club and today we focus on two key papers from recent times - the TRANSLATE trial of transperineal vs transrectal biopsy, and Keynote-564 on the role of adjuvant pembrolizomab following nephrectomy.   
After great feedback from last month's launch episode, we are delighted to welcome back our GU Cast Journal Club Editors, Dr Carlos Delgado (Melbourne, AUS), and Dr Elena Berg (Munich, GER), along with main GU Cast Hosts, Renu Eapen and  Declan Murphy

Links to papers and previous podcasts below:
1. Local anaesthetic transperineal biopsy versus transrectal prostate biopsy in...

We poke around under the hood of a brand new Cyberknife facility here in Melbourne, the first on the East coast of Australia, and find out what it's all about. What is it for, who might benefit, and being surgeons we have to ask, why do they call it a "knife"?! Is it just to make it sound a bit like surgery - stay tuned to find out! 
We chat with our good mate Shankar Siva, stereotactic radiation guru, Nigel Middlebrook, Physicist, shows us the back end, Gemma Waters, Radiation Therapist talks us through planning, and Icon Cancer G...

Big news today with the publication in JAMA of the eagerly anticipated PRIME study, a prospective multicentre trial comparing biparametric (bp) with multiparametric (mp) MRI in men suspected of having prostate cancer. Of course, mpMRI includes contrast enhanced sequences following injection of gadolinium, adding time, cost, plus the burden of gadolinium to bpMRI, and there have been suggestions that bpMRI may be just as effective as mpMRI for detecting clinically significant prostate cancer.
We are joined today by trial PI Veeru Kasivisvanathan (Urologist, UCL, London), and Francesco Giganti (Radiologist, UCL, London), to discuss the findings and what this...

A quick pod to promote the totally free WRSE12 Live Robotic Surgery Event coming up later this month! A 12 hour festival of incredible robotic surgery performed by top surgeons from around the world, with a special focus on real time digital pathology using the very promising Histolog technology that we recently featured on GU Cast. Live surgeries include upper and lower tract, with an array of robotic technology including the da Vinci Single Port robot.
We chat with Urologist Ruben de Groote about this excellent educational initiative from Surgquest, the digital extension of the ORSI Academy in Belgium...

One of our most popular podcasts ever was the one called "Gleason 6 prostate cancer | Why we should rename it (and why we can't)!", posted in December 2022, and featuring Urologists Scott Eggener (Chicago) and Matt Cooperberg), plus Pathologist Eva Comperat (Paris/Vienna). In fact, we still get so many hits on this and active comments on our YouTube site that we thought we better re-visit it!!! Is Gleason 6/Grade Group 1 really cancer at all?? Can't we just re-name it and declare it not-a-cancer??!

Scott and Matt re-join GU Cast today to update us on the campaign!

...

Here it is, the first of our new series called GU Cast Journal Club! A dedicated GU Cast Journal Club has been suggested by many of our listeners and viewers over the years, and we are really pleased to kick off today with the first monthly episode. And we are particularly pleased to introduce our GU Cast Journal Club Editors, Dr Carlos Delgado (Melbourne, AUS), and Dr Elena Berg (Munich, GER). Declan Murphy is anchoring today's episode while Renu is busy elsewhere. 
Each month, two papers will be discussed, each of which are of importance to the GU O...

Now this a topic we are ashamed to say we have barely covered in five plus years of GU Cast! A well overdue deep dive into the management of penile cancer, the rarest of all GU cancers, and fair to say the one that gets the least attention, not just from us, but from those who found research/education/novel therapies etc. 
We are joined in studio by two world-leading experts in penile cancer, Professors Asif Muneer (University College London), and Nathan Lawrentschuk (Royal Melbourne Hospital & Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre), to cover all the key topics in penile c...

Refresh your knowledge of testis cancer with this punchy pod with testis cancer gurus, Prof Christian Kollmannsberger (Vancouver Cancer Centre, Vancouver), and Prof Ben Tran (Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Melbourne). We pick their brains on three topical areas in testis cancer;
1. Adjuvant chemo - balancing early gains vs late effects. How can we figure out who benefits?
2. Primary RPLND - does robotic surgery change the value proposition of surgery vs chemotherapy?
3. The outstanding mi371 tumour marker - a bluffer's guide

With your usual hosts. Declan Murphy and Renu Eapen.

Even better on...

Renu was in Taipei recently and caught up with Prof Jacob Pang, Urologist and President of the Urological Association of Asia Annual meeting which takes place in Taipei from 14-17 August 2025. Find out why you should attend in this quick pod!

UAA 2025 Congress website 

What do Lions Rugby and Cardio-oncology have in common?? Well tune in to this episode of GU Cast to find out! 

The incidence of cardiovascular disease is high in our patients with advanced prostate cancer (more than maybe we appreciate), plus fundamental treatments such as androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) and androgen receptor pathway inhibitors (ARPIs) further increase the risk of cardiovascular events. And now there is a multidisciplinary field called cardio-oncology which is set to address all of this. How do we (simply) assess cardiovascular risk? Who needs to be optimised? What do we need to know a...

Another in our series of Themed Podcasts focussing on GU Oncology in China. We are joined by our China Editor, Dr Yao Zhu (Fudan University, Shanghai), and Prof Xuedong Wei (Soochow University, Jiangsu). to find out what the current treatment landscape is for mHSPC in China. Is it ADT/ARPI doublets for all?? Anyone still give chemo? Who gets a PSMA PET/CT? And what is the current status and role for radioligand therapy at progression? Plus, when are we taking GU Cast to Chin again?! All this and more! 

With your usual hosts, Renu Eapen and D...

Those two gigantic PSMA review papers in European Urology - Perera et al 2016 and Perera et al 2020 - have been cited more than 2000 times and have been the definitive reference for anyone writing about PSMA PET/CT in the past ten years. And they have just been updated in two new papers just published in European Urology! Previous first author (Marlon) Perera, has moved to senior author, while Elio Mazzone has led both papers as first author, co-ordinating a massive effort between research teams in Melbourne and Milano. One paper is focused on diagnosis and staging, and the other...