A long natural history and a predominant osseous pattern of metastatic spread are impediments to the adoption of precision medicine in patients with prostate cancer. To establish the feasibility of clinical genomic profiling in this disease, we performed targeted deep sequencing of tumor and normal DNA from patients with locoregional, metastatic noncastrate, and metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer.

Patients consented to genomic analysis of their tumor and germline DNA. A hybridization capture-based clinical assay was used to identify single-nucleotide variations, small insertions and deletions, copy number alterations, and structural rearrangements in more than 300 cancer-related genes in tumors and matched normal blood.

We successfully sequenced 504 tumors from 451 patients with prostate cancer. Potentially actionable alterations were identified in DNA damage repair, phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase, and mitogen-activated protein kinase pathways. Twenty-seven percent of patients harbored a germline or a somatic alteration in a DNA damage repair gene that may predict for response to poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase inhibition. Profiling of matched tumors from individual patients revealed that somatic TP53 and BRCA2 alterations arose early in tumors from patients who eventually developed metastatic disease. In contrast, comparative analysis across disease states revealed that APC alterations were enriched in metastatic tumors, whereas ATM alterations were specifically enriched in castration-resistant prostate cancer.

Through genomic profiling of prostate tumors that represent the disease clinical spectrum, we identified a high frequency of potentially actionable alterations and possible drivers of disease initiation, metastasis, and castration resistance. Our findings support the routine use of tumor and germline DNA profiling for patients with advanced prostate cancer for the purpose of guiding enrollment in targeted clinical trials and counseling families at increased risk of malignancy.