Dr. Oh on Remaining Challenges With Prostate Cancer Treatment

William K. Oh, MD, chief, Division of Hematology and Medical Oncology, professor of medicine and urology, Mount Sinai Hospital, and deputy director of The Tisch Cancer Institute, discusses remaining challenges with the advancing treatments in prostate cancer.

A lot of phase III studies have now become mature in this space and have led to physicians using new drugs, such as targeted therapies and chemotherapy in earlier disease settings, said Oh. There have also been many novel agents that were first utilized in castration-resistant prostate cancer that are now being utilized in nonmetastatic CRPC, metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer (mHSPC), and earlier lines of therapy.

These advancements leave a situation where physicians do not know what to do when patients relapse after these treatments because, unfortunately, they are not curative, Oh added. The other question that arises is how should physicians sequence these treatments because there are so many to choose from. For example, in the mHSPC setting, it is unclear on whether to use chemotherapy, abiraterone acetate (Zytiga), enzalutamide (Xtandi), and apalutamide (Erleada). A significant challenge in oncology is how to optimize the treatments that are available in a way to get the best outcome for each patient, concludes Oh.