New Therapies for Castration-Resistant Prostate Cancer

On April 29, 2010, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a new immunotherapy, sipuleucel-T, for the treatment of patients with asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. Traditionally, immune-based therapies have been categorized according to whether the agent has direct antitumor effects (so-called passive immunotherapy) or stimulates a host antitumor response (active immunotherapy) and whether the agent elicits a general increase in immune activation (nonspecific) or an immune response based on tumor recognition (specific). Sipuleucel-T is a form of active specific immunotherapy.The sipuleucel-T intervention involves harvesting the patient's peripheral-blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs), culturing them with a chimeric protein . . .