Immunodiagnostics and immunotherapy possibilities for prostate cancer

Abstract

Despite significant progress in early detection and improved treatment modalities prostate cancer remains the second leading cause of cancer death in American men which results in about 30,000 deaths per year in the USA. An aggressive phenotype leading to 2.58% risk of dying from prostate cancer still exists and immunotherapy has offered new possibilities to treat metastatic prostate cancer that cannot be treated by other modalities. Cancer immunotherapy is a rapidly growing field of research aimed at identifying biomarkers in immunodiagnosis and to develop new therapies by enabling the immune system to detect and destroy cancer cells. Immunotherapy falls into three different broad categories which are checkpoint inhibitors, cytokines, and vaccine immunotherapy. While immunotherapy to treat prostate cancer is still limited progress has been made; for treatment of advanced prostate cancer sipuleucel-T has been administered to patients in personalized doses to destroy prostate cancer cells which is promising and invites further research to determine immunotherapies for advanced prostate cancer. Antibody-based targeted immunotherapy and dendritic-cell-based vaccination are among the therapies that are currently being evaluated as promising approaches to treat prostate cancer. Combination immunotherapies include prostate cancer vaccines and radiotherapy for castration resistant prostate cancer. Microbial vectors for prostate cancer immunotherapy have been developed and bacterial strains have been engineered to express cancer-specific antigens, cytokines, and prodrug-converting cytokines. These approaches are addressed in the present review.