Overcoming Challenges in the mCRPC Treatment Landscape

Announcer:
Welcome to Project Oncology on ReachMD. On this episode, sponsored by Novartis, we’ll discuss common challenges in the treatment of metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer and how we can overcome them with Dr. Che-Kai Tsao. Dr. Tsao is the Medical Director of the Medical Oncology Prostate Cancer Program at the Mount Sinai Tisch Cancer Institute in New York. Let’s hear from him now.

Dr. Tsao:
I think we're currently in a renaissance for developing therapies for metastatic prostate cancer, particularly in metastatic CRPC. There are many different classes of therapy, including targeted therapies, immunotherapies, hormone therapies, chemotherapies, radioligand therapy, and others. But this is also a time where we now have various therapies, but we still don't know what is the optimal sequence of therapies that we give patients. There needs to be greater efforts and focus on personalization based on biomarkers and based on patient selection. I think, really, this needs to be the focus going forward.

So we're very fortunate to have a number of great options in terms of antigen receptor inhibitors, and we've seen that patients have benefited from them from a series of clinical trials that led to overall survival with these agents. However, there is going to be a limitation going forward, as we know that inevitably, most patients develop resistance to these therapies. And we now really need to focus on how we develop additional therapeutics, whether in combination or with different mechanistic approaches that we could really continue to treat this disease and result in the best patient outcome.

And I think there's an extraordinary focus in collecting tissues, whether it's biopsies that we obtain from the radical prostatectomy and the prostate biopsies or whether we collect circulating DNAs and RNAs in the bloodstream before and after therapies. So the ability to do that consistently throughout different prospective randomized clinical trials will allow us to better understand how to overcome these potential therapeutic resistance mechanisms, and it's going to help us accelerate the development of therapies to better treat our patients.

Announcer:
This episode of Project Oncology was sponsored by Novartis. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Project Oncology on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!