ASCO 2017 | Can vaccines and immune checkpoint inhibitors work together to treat prostate cancer?

Ravi A. Madan, MD, from the National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD, discusses current research on immunotherapies for prostate cancer, presented at the American Society of Oncology (ASCO) 2017 Annual Meeting in Chicago, IL. An FDA-approved vaccine, sipuleucel-T, has been demonstrated to improve overall survival rates in patients with prostate cancer, as detailed by Dr. Madan. He also explains that the vaccine mobilised T-cells within the tumour microenvironment, which raises the possibility that vaccines could optimise patients’ response to immune checkpoint inhibitors, which normally do not work well, likely due to an insufficient T-cell count within the microenvironment.