Dr. Slovin on the Role of Immunotherapy for Prostate Cancer

Susan F. Slovin, MD, PhD, medical oncologist, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, discusses the current role of immunotherapy in patients with advanced prostate cancer.

Prostate cancer was among the first solid tumor to have a positive experience with immune-based therapy, Slovin explains. For the last 30 years, there has been a variety of different platforms of immunotherapy including vaccine and viral vectors, none of which showed any impact for patients with prostate cancer.

The FDA approval of sipuleucel-T (Provenge) represented the first successful immunotherapy for a solid tumor that showed a survival benefit. All approaches that have been done subsequently are attempting to look at other ways of using the body’s immune system to fight cancer, states Slovin.