Former President Joe Biden, who as vice president under Barack Obama launched a “Cancer Moonshot” program to speed innovation in preventing and treating the disease, has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer.
Biden’s personal representative said on May 18 that Biden had been seen by a physician “for a new finding of a prostate nodule after experiencing increasing urinary symptoms. On May 16 he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, characterized by a Gleason score of 9 with metastasis to the bone.”
A Gleason score, explains University of Colorado Cancer Center member Al Barqawi, MD, is a grading system for prostate cancer that combines scores for the two most cancerous areas of the prostate, ranking each from a 1 to 5 scale based on how abnormal they look. A combined Gleason score of 6 or higher is considered cancerous.
According to the American Cancer Society, there will be approximately 313,780 new cases of prostate cancer in the U.S. in 2025, and about 35,770 deaths from the disease.
We spoke with Barqawi, professor in the CU Department of Surgery, to learn more about what Biden’s case tells us about how prostate cancer is diagnosed and treated.