With the incidence of cancer increasing every year, there is an urgent clinical need for proven treatments, and CAR-T therapy is considered one of the most promising cancer treatments, offering new hope in the fight against cancer.
CAR-T therapy uses genetic engineering to allow a patient’s T cells to express chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) that have anti-tumor-specific antigen activity, allowing the T cells to become a weapon to kill tumor cells.
While CAR-T cells have shown remarkable clinical efficacy in treating hematologic tumors, they have been less successful in solid tumors. For scientists, CAR-T for solid tumors, including prostate cancer, remains a huge test because the molecules targeted by CAR-T appear not only on the surface of cancer cells but also on the surface of normal cells, resulting in serious side effects.
But at the 24th annual Prostate Cancer Fund meeting in Washington, D.C., in 2017, Poseida Therapeutics, a company focused on developing novel CAR-T therapies, presented the results of a preclinical study of P-PSMA-101 against prostate cancer, which demonstrated potent anti-tumor activity during treatment as well as P-PSMA-101 demonstrated potent antitumor activity and a durable response during treatment, resulting in the complete elimination of solid tumors in a preclinical mouse model of previously incurable prostate cancer.
Therefore, there is reason to believe that CAR-T therapy could treat prostate cancer in the near future.