A new treatment slows resistant prostate cancer by 35%.

A new therapeutic approach has shown promising results in the treatment of advanced prostate cancer resistant to hormone treatments. According to an international study published today in the prestigious journal The Lancet Oncology , the combination of two drugs, cabozantinib and atezolizumab , reduces the risk of progression or death by 35% in patients with metastasis and no effective options available to date.

The phase 3 clinical trial, called CONTACT-02, included 507 patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer who were no longer responding to androgen receptor inhibitors, one of the most common treatments. These patients often face a very difficult prognosis, especially those with soft tissue metastases such as the liver.

"Prostate cancer at this advanced stage, resistant to hormone therapy, has an average survival rate of less than two years, and current treatments offer limited benefits," explains Joan Carles, an oncologist at Vall d'Hebron University Hospital and researcher at the Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO), and co-author of the study.

After nearly 12 months of follow-up, patients who received the combination of cabozantinib, a tyrosine kinase inhibitor, and atezolizumab, an immunotherapy that blocks the PD-L1 protein, experienced a progression-free survival of 6.3 months, compared with 4.2 months for those who received a second conventional hormonal treatment.

Although overall survival did not yet show statistically significant differences, a significant increase of nearly five months was observed in patients with liver metastases, reinforcing the potential of this therapy in particularly aggressive cases.

This study represents the first time that a combination of immunotherapy and a tyrosine kinase inhibitor has been superior to a second hormonal treatment in this type of cancer, and could mark an important change in the way these cases are treated.

" The results give us hope and could open the door to a new therapeutic option for patients who until now had very limited alternatives beyond chemotherapy," concludes Dr. Carles.