Dr. Slovin on the Challenges of Immunotherapy in Prostate Cancer

Susan F. Slovin, MD, PhD, medical oncologist, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, discusses the challenges of immunotherapy in prostate cancer.

Through the application of immunotherapy agents in tumor types such as prostate cancer, researchers have learned that current readouts are not correlating with the change in the biology of the cancer.

Slovin says that tissue, blood, plasma, circulating tumor cells, and cell-free DNA should be collected as each patient’s disease transforms throughout treatment. This is in order to find the correlation between biological change and agent application.

FDA approvals will depend on if the immune agent correlates with the change in the biology of the cancer, Slovin says—which has yet to be observed in the cancers that these agents have been studied in.