New Therapeutic for Prostate Cancer

Prostate cancer is a deadly disease that takes many lives each year with limited promising treatment options. However, a recent study published explains a promising new method of treating prostate cancer known as PSMA theranostics that can improve patient outcomes, modeling its use in a cancer center in Australia.

What is prostate cancer?

The prostate is a small reproductive organ in males that makes semen. Prostate cancer happens when abnormal cells in the prostate start to grow very rapidly, disrupting nearby organs and taking important nutrients from the rest of the body. It is one of the most common types of cancer found in men.

Prostate cancer is normally treated using chemotherapy, a method of cancer treatment that uses drugs to destroy cancer cells and stop tumors from growing. However, this treatment has many negative side effects for patients, like hair loss and extreme tiredness.

What is theranostics?

Theranostics, from the words “therapy” and “diagnostics,” is a technique to diagnose and treat cancer using elements, called radioisotopes, that release radiation for imaging and treating cancer.

PSMA theranostics

Prostate-Specific Membrane Antigen (PSMA) is a protein found in large amounts in prostate cancer cells. PSMA is what the medicine used in PSMA theranostics targets in order to get into prostate cancer cells. PSMA is the perfect protein to use for theranostics because of the large quantities found in prostate cancer cells.

PSMA theranostics works by attaching radioisotopes to the PSMA to “label” the proteins. Scientists can detect even very small amounts of labeled prostate cancer using medical scans to create images of the cancer. If these scans show a patient would benefit from treatment, they can use another labeled PSMA to treat the cancer by using radioisotopes deadly to prostate cancer cells. 

PSMA therapy is currently being studied in several clinical trials. One study, the UpFrontPSMA trial, combined standard chemotherapy with PSMA therapy earlier in the treatment to determine whether a combined method is more effective than chemotherapy alone.

Why it matters

PSMA theranostics offers a promising new approach for treating advanced prostate cancer as it combines diagnosis and treatment and provides several other benefits compared to current treatments. Current treatments, such as chemotherapy, often have various negative side effects. PSMA theranostics lack many of these negative side effects by using such a targeted approach to attacking prostate cancer cells. Multiple research studies have shown that PSMA theranostics very accurately target prostate cancer tumors with very little damage to any surrounding healthy tissue. This benefit alone makes PSMA so exciting for prostate cancer treatment.

On top of fewer side effects, patients who received PSMA therapy lived longer– about 15.3 months compared with 11.3 months for those who had standard care. These results suggest PSMA theranostics is an exciting step forward, providing a more effective and precise treatment for prostate cancer.

Written by Arav Varma, Olivia Severson, Mandy Huynh, & Paul Singer

Edited by Mallory Kane, MD

References

1. Jewell K, Hofman MS, Ong JSL, Levy S. Emerging Theranostics for Prostate Cancer and a Model of Prostate-specific Membrane Antigen Therapy. Radiology. 2024;311(1). doi:https://doi.org/10.1148/radiol.231703