Immunotherapy for Prostate Cancer: Where Do We Go From Here?-PART 1: Prostate Cancer Vaccines

Immunotherapies have emerged as a revolutionary modality for cancer treatment, and a variety of immune-based approaches are currently being investigated in the field of prostate cancer. Despite the 2010 approval of sipuleucel-T, subsequent progress in prostate cancer immunotherapy development has been limited by disappointing results with novel vaccination approaches and by prostate cancer's general resistance to immune checkpoint blockade. Nevertheless, there remains strong preclinical and clinical evidence to suggest that prostate cancer is a susceptible target for immune therapies. Innovative strategies for vaccine development, adoptive cell transfer, alleviation of immunosuppression in the tumor microenvironment, and combinatorial approaches using existing drugs and novel immune agents hold great promise for improving the treatment of prostate cancer. The first article in this two-part series will provide an overview of both past and present therapeutic vaccination strategies for the promotion of antitumor immunity against prostate cancer. Later, in Part 2, we will discuss novel areas of clinical development and identify the trends that may define the future of prostate cancer immunotherapy.