VIDEO: Positioning immunotherapies in prostate cancer care

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Currently, there’s been really limited success of immunotherapy for prostate cancer. We have sipuleucel-T, which was approved more than a decade ago and did show a survival prolongation. But since then, it's been nothing but negative studies.

So, we do have more powerful immunotherapy technologies now, such as bispecific T-cell-engaging antibodies and [chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)] T-cell therapy, oncolytic viruses. So, there's really a renewed interest in figuring out how to overcome the immune-suppressive prostate cancer microenvironment and leverage some of these more advanced technologies in immunotherapy to achieve some success, because, really, right now, it’s either the finding of microsatellite instability on genetic testing or somatic testing that opens the door to an immune checkpoint inhibitor. And even there the results are really, unfortunately, not nearly as good as they are in other cancers with that same genomic underpinning. It's either that or sip-T.

So, we really have a lot of work to do, and we’re doing a lot of it at City of Hope, trying to help incorporate these stronger immunotherapies to achieve better outcomes in prostate cancer.