VIDEO: New targets sought for advanced prostate cancer treatment

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Targeted therapy implies that we know exactly what's driving the cancer and we can actually deliver a drug that kills that specific cancer cell. I always like to remind everyone that one of the first targeted therapies was actually androgen receptor-targeted therapy because androgen receptor is expressed on most prostate cancers, even as they progress. So when we talk about targeted therapies now, we're thinking of, for example, resistance pathways in prostate cancer, and PSMA is one of those.

DNA damage repair pathways are also another mechanism of progression. And the most recent evidence really also suggests that neuroendocrine prostate cancers may also represent an important target because those are the types of cancer cells that may progress in the setting of androgen deprivation therapy and ARPIs. Right now, it's really about picking the right drug at the right moment in time so that as cancers progress, we're able to use these newer treatments.

Maybe down the road, especially now we're already using ARPIs early on in the course of new diagnosis of metastatic disease, for instance. But unfortunately, they're not curing all of these patients, and so we're gonna continue to have to find new targets and bring some of these new targets, for example, targeting neuroendocrine prostate cancer, earlier into the disease course.