Four new drugs could help change advanced prostate cancer from a terminal disease to a chronic illness, according to a prostate cancer expert in a recent review for the journal Oncology.
“It’s not just chemotherapy. The drugs have different and innovative methods of action. One is a bone protective agent; another’s a more effective hormone agent; another is radiotherapy; and the final one is the first drug tested for cancer immunotherapy,” says E. David Crawford, MD, investigator at the University of Colorado Cancer Center and head of urologic oncology at University of Colorado Hospital.
“Even without the addition of any more drugs, we may now have the tools that in combination will allow us to extend the survival prognosis of a prostate cancer patient long enough to make prostate cancer a disease a patient is more likely to die with than from,” Crawford says.
The four new medications include:
1. Denosumab
Denosumab “has 3 uses in protecting the bones of prostate cancer patients,” says Crawford. For patients with existing bone metastasis, it can prevent bone fractures. For patients whose calcium is depleted as a side effect of hormone therapy, it can prevent osteoporosis. And third, denosumab has also been shown to delay bone metastasis for an average of 4 months in patients whose PSA scores point to the high possibility of bone involvement.
2. Alpharadin
Alpharadin is in a class of drugs that emit radiation, thus allowing doctors to deliver radiation more precisely to tumor sites. Alpha rather than beta particles are emitted by Alpharadin, which permits accurate targeting of bone metastasis sites with reduced damage to surrounding bone marrow.
3. Prostvac
Prostvac is the first “immunotherapy” drug for the treatment of cancer. Acting like a vaccine, it prepares the patient’s immune system to recognize and destroy prostate cancer cells. Prostvac extended the median survival time from 16.6 to 25.1 months in a phase 2 clinical trial involving 125 patients.
4. Abiraterone Acetate
Abiraterone acetate fights prostate cancer by restraining the body’s ability to produce testosterone, a hormone that many prostate cancers require for development.
Crawford hopes that the use of these drugs may advance to first-line therapies in the future. However, for now, Crawford says that these drugs are being approved for use only after more established therapies have failed.
Source: University of Colorado Cancer Center.