Combinations of treatments based on radiotherapy or radionuclides to enhance immunotherapy efficacy in advanced prostate cancer: a systematic review.

BACKGROUND

Prostate cancer (PCa) has been considered an immunologically "cold tumor". Indeed, in advanced PCa, immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) or anti-tumor vaccines have shown poor results in phase II and phase III trials with the exception of sipuleucel-T that showed a modest survival benefit. Radiotherapy and Targeted radioisotopes, such as 223Radium or 177Lu-PSMA-617 monotherapy, contributed in prolonging the progression-free survival of PCa patients in second or third line. However, potential benefits of combination with immune therapies were inconstantly investigated and outcomes often were discordant.

OBJECTIVE

Aim of this systematic review was to gather and analyze clinical evidence about benefits and risks of combining ionizing-radiation-based treatments with the main immunotherapies administed in clinical and experimental oncology for the setting of metastatic PCa.

METHODS

We performed a systematic review according to the PRISMA-ScR criteria, investigating PubMed, Web of science, Embase and Medline databases from February 2000 to April 2024, searching for phase I to phase III clinical trials associating radiotherapy with immunotherapy (RT/IT) in metastatic PCa patients.

CONCLUSION

We observed that combination of Ipilimumab with stereotactic beam radiotherapy (SBRT) at the dose of 8 Gy performed about 12 days (range 2-21) before immunotherapy was liked with trials with a significative gain in progression-free survival. Furtherly, we described better objective responses when immunotherapies, were associated with SBRT than radionuclides An exception was 177Lu-PSMA-617, which showed promising synergic results after few cycles of standard doses, suggesting a possible enhancing of immune system, in particular when associated with anti-PD1 (pembrolizumab). Due to the few data reported in literature, both for radiotherapy and radionuclides, however, future randomized trials should confirm these data.