Table of Contents

Chapter 9: Emerging Therapies on the Horizon

a. The Goal of Targeted Therapies

Chemotherapy drugs can play an important role in improving the lives of men with advanced prostate cancer, but they often don’t distinguish between tumor cells and healthy cells and can kill off some normal cells along the way. So-called targeted therapies, by contrast, are drugs that are specifically designed to interfere with the way cancer cells grow, with the way cancer cells interact with each other, and/or with the way that our bodies’ immune systems interact with the cancer.

There are a number of different kinds of targeted therapies being investigated for prostate cancer; in this Chapter, we’ll focus on four of them. Some of the drugs in these four categories have shown promise in the lab and are only first starting to show benefit in men with the disease. Others are already being rigorously tested in men enrolled in large clinical trials and look like they might provide significant benefit to men with advanced prostate cancer. As of yet, none of these drugs have been approved by the FDA for use in prostate cancer, but the excitement generated by some of the early studies have led many researchers to believe that it’s only a matter of time before a targeted therapy is found that can result in better outcomes overall.