The New Advancement in Treatment of Prostate Cancer - PROVENGE Term Paper

The New Advancement in Treatment of Prostate Cancer - PROVENGE (sipuleucel-T) - Term Paper ExampleSadly, according to Vogelzang (1996), metastatic HRPC is responsible for close all prostate pubic louse deaths. Medical options currently available for the give-and-take and management of prostate crabmeat include radical prostatectomy, radiation therapy, mitoxantrone, estramustine, vinca alkaloids, doxurobicin, and taxanes, among others (Middletone, 1996 Goodin et al., 2002). The choice of therapeutic management, however, is greatly determined by how ripe(p) the disease has become. For instance, studies have shown that radiotherapy and radical prostatectomy could increase survival rate of patients with horizontal spring up 1 and phase angle 2 prostate cancers by as much as 95% in the next 5 years but were no longer effective in treating the disease in its metastatic stage (Middleton, 1996). On the other hand, for patients with HRPC, taxane-based chemotherapy has demonstrated a modest survival advantage, but median survival after(prenominal) treatment is only 19 months (Small et al., 2006). Moreover, not all cancer patients are candidates for chemotherapy. Hence, more effective treatment regimens for advanced and metastatic prostate cancer are needed. A more recent advancement in the field of prostate cancer management is the use of the patients immune system to chip the disease through and through the administration of a non-prophylactic cancer vaccine (McNeel, 2007 Sonpavde et al., 2007). Sipuleucel-T, the first ever vaccine that whole kit and boodle against late-stage, metastatic, and hormone-refractory prostate cancers, is an autologous cellular immunotherapy specifically designed to stimulate the bodys immune responses (FDA, 2010). This news report highlights sipuleucel-T (tradename PROVENGE) as a novel, nontoxic modality for the treatment of advanced prostate cancer. Specifically, this paper aims to review what sipuleucel-T (PROVENGE) is, its comp onents, its status effects, evidences of its effectiveness based on clinical trial studies, and its advantages over some of the existing prostate cancer treatments. Discussion Among the different immunotherapy approaches investigated in the past, the use of dendritic cells (DCs), which are the main antigen-presenting cells (APCs) of the body, was found to be the well-nigh efficient way of presenting cancer antigen to the immune system (Bono et al., 2010). Sipuleucel-T, produced by Dendreon Corporation under the tradename of PROVENGE, is a cancer vaccine that makes use of the patients own dendritic cells, hence the term autologous immunotherapy, to cleanse T-cell response (Harzstark and Small, 2009 FDA, 2010). Specifically, each dose of PROVENGE contains at least 50 million autologous CD54+ cells activated with a recombinant human protein called PAP-GM-CSF, composed of prostatic acid phosphatase (PAP) and granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) (FDA, 2010). CD54+ , a cell surface glycoprotein that functions as a stimulator on APCs, bind to its receptor on the surface of T-cells during the process of antigen presentation (CST, 2010). Meanwhile, PAP is a surface antigen expressed in prostate tumor cells. Studies have shown that PAP antigen is relatively specific to prostate epithelium, make it a good target for vaccines (Oh, 2010 Nabhan et al., 2011). On the other hand, GM-CSF is an immune cell activator (FDA, 2010). The CD54+ cells collected from the patient through a process known as leukapheresis, are treated with