Finding the Fit for Immunotherapy in Prostate Cancer

Prostate cancer tumors tend to be "cold," meaning that they may have difficulty responding to immunotherapy treatment. But combining agents may help improve their responsiveness, explained Michael Lai, ARNP, a nurse practitioner at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.

TRANSCRIPTION

So in prostate cancer, we're looking at, for example, immunotherapy and utilizing this in that context. For immunotherapy, what we're doing right now is, as opposed to doing a single-agent model, using dual agents, because prostate cancer can tend to be a relatively "cold" tumor. So if you use something like docetaxel first or in conjunction with immunotherapies like pembrolizumab (Keytruda) or standard-of-care agents such as abiraterone (Zytiga), the idea is: can we warm up the tumor so that the prostate cancer is more susceptible to immunotherapy agents such as pembrolizumab or others.