Chemotherapy for prostate cancer: finally an advance!

Patients with metastatic prostate cancer can be treated with androgen deprivation strategies; however, most patients will eventually develop androgen-independent prostate cancer (AIPC). Until recently, chemotherapy has been shown to palliate symptoms of disease but not improve survival. Now 2 large phase 3 trials have demonstrated an overall survival advantage for docetaxel-based regimens compared with the best standard of care. This firmly cements docetaxel-based therapies as the standard of care for patients with metastatic androgen-independent disease. In addition, this foundation provides a platform for the translation of novel agents into new combination cancer therapies. In this paper, we not only review standard treatment options available for AIPC including the recently completed docetaxel trials, but also present some of the promising new drug combinations of currently available drugs.