GU Cancers 2021 | Radioligands in the future of prostate cancer treatment

So, I think if I sit here in early 2021 and think what are the areas of prostate cancer research that I think show most excitement or most potential in the next five years, I think I would clearly put at the top of the list radioligand therapy.

I think while we have seen quite amazing progress in metastatic prostate cancer over the past 10 years, a lot of it has been based around similar things, similar themes. Androgen deprivation therapy supplemented by AR or targeted therapies. For example, we’ve seen chemotherapy, which has been well-established for many years, still there as a viable option. And of course, in the precision medicine era, we have seen DNA repair as a really viable target using drugs like olaparib and rucaparib.

But then take something totally different, like radioligand therapy. Take a therapy that’s well-established in different diseases like neuroendocrine tumors and bring that forward, pairing it with the dramatic advancements we’ve seen in PSMA imaging, and I think what we have is a really interesting combination that will allow us to explore therapy options for our prostate cancer patients that we didn’t have five years ago.

So I think this next five years, we’ll have a lot of excitement in taking radioligand therapy from end stage prostate cancer into earlier and earlier stages. And I’m very confident that it will find a very comfortable place where it improves survival and improves quality of life for many men across the spectrum of prostate cancer. Quite where that ends up, is it just in more advanced CRPC, or is it perhaps in hormone sensitive disease? Could it even be in the high-risk, localized prostate cancer population? I’m not quite sure, but I think it will be a very exciting five years of research upcoming with radioligand therapy.