Only a small minority of prostate cancer patients benefit from immunotherapy. Gerhardt Attard, MD, PhD, FRCP, of the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK, spoke to us at the UK Oncology Forum (OF) 2018 in Liverpool, UK about the need for biomarker screening to determine which patients should be given immunotherapeutic agents. He discusses the NEPTUNES study (NCT03061539), which will select patients to receive a combination therapy of two immune checkpoint inhibitors according to a set of biomarkers: mismatch repair deficiency, defective DNA repair and a high inflammatory infiltrate level. The goal of this study is to accurately identify and treat the minority group of patients who will benefit from immunotherapy.
