Quo Vadis Advanced Prostate Cancer Therapy? Novel Treatment Perspectives and Possible Future Directions

Abstract

Prostate cancer is a very common disease, which is, unfortunately, often the cause of many male deaths. This is underlined by the fact that the early stages of prostate cancer are often asymptomatic. Therefore, the disease is usually detected and diagnosed at late advanced or even metastasized stages, which are already difficult to treat. Hence, it is important to pursue research and development not only in terms of novel diagnostic methods but also of therapeutic ones, as well as to increase the effectiveness of the treatment by combinational medicinal approach. Therefore, in this review article, we focus on recent approaches and novel potential tools for the treatment of advanced prostate cancer; these include not only androgen deprivation therapy, antiandrogen therapy, photodynamic therapy, photothermal therapy, immunotherapy, multimodal therapy, but also poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase, Akt and cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitors.