Exploring New Treatment Options in Prostate Cancer Landscape

Naomi Haas, MD, director, Prostate and Kidney Cancer Program, associate professor, Medicine, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, discusses the current areas of ongoing research in the treatment landscape for patients with prostate cancer, specifically metastatic castration-resistant disease.

There are several studies exploring bispecific T-cell engager (BiTE) therapies, which is different from other approaches as it allows for repeat dosing that could be an advantage or disadvantage to the patient. Haas says the advantage to BiTE therapy is that the therapy can be generated and don’t need to be made specific.

The CART trials, exploring adoptive chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies, are patient-specific, so to make a CART, patients must undergo apheresis to remove the T cells, then the T cells are infected with the lentivirus, Haas says. The BiTE therapies are generated more synthetically.

Lutetium is in between in terms of research as there are little data on a second set of repeat dosing. At this time, Haas says CART is where physicians think of 1 dose or maybe a second retreatment dose, lutetium is between 2 and 4 doses, and BiTE therapy is given more chronically to patients.