Scott T. Tagawa, MD, Talks Current Initiatives in Prostate Cancer

At the15th Annual Interdisciplinary Prostate Cancer Congress® and Other Genitourinary Malignancies, CancerNetwork® spoke with Scott T. Tagawa, MD, from Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, about current initiatives in prostate cancer. He mentioned nearing approval of Lutetium-177 (177Lu-PSMA-617) and how it would help to expand upon treatment options for patients with prostate cancer.

Transcription:

Translation from research to therapeutics is going to have a significant impact on the lives of patients with advanced prostate cancer. This happens to be PSA [prostate specific antigen],–targeted radionucleotides with the expected 2022 approval of 177Lu-PSMA-617. That’s going to be a near-term approval with a new class of drugs. Hopefully we can expand upon that to make [treatment] even better by using it for earlier patient populations in combinations or in better patient selections. That’s the possibility.

For a major advance in the future, maybe not in 2022 but in the future, are more effective immunotherapeutics. It does not appear [to be ready for the real-world setting], other than in very select patients, at least not [with PD-1 or PD-L1 inhibitors]. There are a number of other immunotherapeutics targeted typically against cell surface proteins, such as PSMA [prostate-specific membrane antigen] or PSCA [prostate stem cell antigen]. There’s also STEEP1, DLL3, and a number of other cell service targets, [that can be targeted with] either bispecifics, or BiTEs, or with CAR T cell therapies. I don’t think that’s ready for prime time today. I’m quite hopeful that at least a substantial subset [of patients are] able to handle these drugs. We might not just see an improvement for some number of months, but some very durable responses or maybe even cures with some of these instruments. That’s what I’m hoping for in the future.