Dr. Hope discusses the FDA approval of 177Lu-PSMA-617 for prostate cancer

In this interview, Thomas A. Hope, MD, highlights the impact that FDA approval of 177Lu-PSMA-617 radionuclide therapy has had for the field of prostate cancer. Hope is a nuclear medicine physician and radiologist, a professor of radiology, and the director of the radioligand therapy program at the University of California, San Francisco.

Video Transcript:

The approval of 177Lu-PSMA-617radioligand therapy for my field in nuclear medicine was an enormous deal. Because treating of prostate cancer is a large amount of patients that suddenly my field needs to manage and help take care of. So, that's a huge impact. But for the patient, it's nearly as big of an impact. If you think about prostate cancer, there's only 2 main categories of therapy. You have androgen receptor targeted therapies, Lupron, androgen deprivation therapy, AR targeted therapies like abiraterone, enzalutamide, apalutamide. darolutamide. And then the other category is chemotherapy: docetaxel, cabazitaxel. And you do have some patients who meet criteria for PARP inhibitors or immunotherapy, but that's a small minority of patients. So, there's really only 2 paths that we treat patients with prostate cancer at this time. This is a whole other approach to treating patients with this cancer. If you think about that from the perspective of prostate cancer as a whole, this is a big deal because it brings and opens up a new approach to treating this cancer.

Now, how [do] we use this? I think we have decades to learn about how to use this appropriately. If you think about androgen deprivation therapy, the time it took just to get to intermittent ADT was decades. So, each of these therapies, we'll have to learn how to use them. Which one comes first or second, together, et cetera. We're right at the very beginnings of this, but this just opened up a new avenue that didn't exist beforehand to treat patients with prostate cancer.

This transcription has been edited for clarity