compared with white men, Black men with advanced prostate cancer stand to benefit more from proactive screening and the treatment, immunotherapy.
Analyses of a recent real-world study reported earlier this year revealed that immunotherapy may be more effective in African American men with advanced prostate cancer, as compared with white men.
Black men who received this treatment lived more than 4.5 years, contrasted with only 2.5 years for Caucasian men—a difference of 20.9 months—and a 48 percent relative risk reduction of death.
Most importantly, no other prostate cancer treatment has shown this level of added benefit in African American men with advanced prostate cancer.
Dendreon Pharmaceuticals, a commercial-stage biopharmaceutical company and pioneer in the development of immunotherapy, announced these findings this past March from a sub-analysis of data from its PROCEED registry, comparing the overall survival of African American and white men with metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) who were treated with the drug PROVENGE® (sipuleucel-T), in a real-world treatment setting. PROVENGE is the only FDA-approved immunotherapy made from a patient’s own immune cells for the treatment of prostate cancer.
To date, over 30,000 men have been prescribed PROVENGE, and via clinical trials it has been proven to extend life for certain men in advanced stages of the disease.
The PROCEED registry enrolled nearly 2,000 patients with mCRPC who received PROVENGE between the years 2011 and 2014, and tracked them for three years.
PROCEED evaluated the real-world use of PROVENGE in men with asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic mCRPC.
The registry was a multicenter, open-label observational registry conducted at urology and medical oncology clinics in private practice and academic sites.
So, there’s hope on the horizon, and certainly increasingly better news to come, but we repeat to Black men that the first step of this journey, as always, is to get screened and tested—extensively if you must.