Cancer immunotherapy: a paradigm shift for prostate cancer treatment.
Prostate cancer remains a significant health problem for men in the Western world. Although treatment modalities are available, these do not confer long-term benefit and are accompanied by deleterious side effects. Immunotherapy represents a valuable alternative to conventional treatments by inducing tumour-specific immune responses that control the growth of cancer cells. Sipuleucel-T is approved by the FDA as an immunotherapeutic agent for the treatment of patients with asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC). Although this approval has raised cost-versus-benefit issues, it has provided proof of concept for the therapeutic potential of active immunotherapy approaches for metastatic CRPC. Numerous clinical studies have demonstrated clinical benefit using immunotherapy compared to traditional chemotherapy and several active immunotherapy approaches (at various developmental stages)have demonstrated the potential to change the face of prostate cancer treatment.
Department of Urology, University of Kansas Medical Center, Kansas City, 3901 Rainbow Boulevard, Kansas City, KS 66106, USA. dkaran@kumc.edu
Dev
D
Karan
Jeffrey M
JM
Holzbeierlein
Peter
P
Van Veldhuizen
J Brantley
JB
Thrasher
D000818:Animals; D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic / Q000639:trends; D006801:Humans; D007167:Immunotherapy / Q000379:methods / Q000639:trends*; D008297:Male; D011471:Prostatic Neoplasms / Q000276:immunology* / Q000628:therapy*; D016896:Treatment Outcome