Radiation oncologist Dr. Luca Valle, associate professor of radiation oncology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, has been selected to receive the 2026 ASTRO-PCF Young Investigator Award from the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) and the Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCF).
The award will support Valle’s research to validate a novel DNA-based genomic classifier, called STRATOS-P, that could help physicians better predict how individual patients with prostate cancer will respond to radiation therapy. The goal is to develop a tool that can help guide treatment decisions based on the biology of a patient’s cancer.
“Patients with prostate cancer can have very different outcomes even when their disease appears similar based on conventional clinical measures,” said Valle, who is an investigator at the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and staff physician at the Greater Los Angeles VA Healthcare System. “Our goal is to determine whether this genomic classifier can provide additional information to help us identify which patients are most likely to benefit from targeted radiation therapy and which patients may be at greater risk of developing metastatic disease.”
Valle’s study will focus on two groups of patients. For those with oligometastatic prostate cancer, in which the cancer has spread to five or fewer sites, the researchers will evaluate whether STRATOS-P can predict who is most likely to benefit from metastasis-directed radiation therapy, which uses highly targeted radiation to treat sites of cancer spread. The study will also examine whether the classifier can identify patients with high-risk localized prostate cancer who are most likely to develop metastatic disease.
