During the past 10 years, preclinical studies implicating sustained androgen receptor (AR) signalling as the primary driver of castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) have led to the development of novel agents targeting the AR pathway that are now in widespread clinical use.
These drugs prolong the survival of patients with late-stage prostate cancer but are not curative. In this Review, we highlight emerging mechanisms of acquired resistance to these contemporary therapies, which fall into the three broad categories of restored AR signalling, AR bypass signalling and complete AR independence. This diverse range of resistance mechanisms presents new challenges for long-term disease control, which may be addressable through early use of combination therapies guided by recent insights from genomic landscape studies of CRPC.
Nature reviews. Cancer. 2015 Nov 13 [Epub ahead of print]
Philip A Watson, Vivek K Arora, Charles L Sawyers
Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, New York 10065, USA. , Division of Medical Oncology, Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, Missouri 63130, USA. , Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, New York 10065, USA.