Prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer, and the second leading cause of cancer-related death, for men in the United States. Despite the approval of several new agents for advanced disease, each of these has prolonged survival by only a few months. Consequently new therapies are sorely needed. For other cancer types, immunotherapy has demonstrated dramatic and durable treatment responses, causing many to hope that immunotherapies might provide an ideal treatment approach for advanced prostate cancer. However, apart from sipuleucel-T, prostate cancer has been conspicuously absent from the list of malignancies for which immunotherapies have received recent FDA approval. This has left some wondering if immunotherapy will “work” for this disease. In this review we describe current immunotherapy developments, including approaches to engage tumor-targeting T cells, disrupt immune regulation, and alter the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment. We then describe the recent application of these approaches to the treatment of prostate cancer. Given the FDA approval of one agent, and the fact that several others are in advanced stages of clinical testing, we believe that immunotherapies offer real hope to improve patient outcomes for prostate cancer, especially as investigators begin to explore rational combinations of immunotherapies and combine these therapies with other conventional therapies.
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