Prostate cancer, especially castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) with its very poor prognosis, quite difficult treatments and urgent need of new theraputic strategies has become a serious problem of men′s health in our country. Recent studies have shown that prostate cancer cells can stimulate the immune response; therefore, immunotherapy has become one of the hot spots in the treatment of CRPC. Cancer vaccines including polypeptide vaccines, nucleic acid vaccines, whole cell vaccines and autologous dendritic cell vaccines have been in stage Ⅱ or Ⅲ clinical trials, and will have good application prospects. Immune checkpoint inhibitors for the treatment of melanoma have got satisfactory results, but for CRPC are lack of systematic researches and the effects remain to be followed-up. Immune modulators for CRPC have shown antitumor activity, but the overall survival of patients was not improved. Existing studies have shown that immunotherapy of CRPC has good prospects, but most drugs are still in the research stage and need a considerable distance before clinical application. The optimal timing of immunotherapy, value of combined administration, evaluation of therapeutic effect, potential immune-based predictive and prognostic biomarkers are to be explored. With the development of tumor immune agents and the accumulation of evidence based medicine, CRPC immunotherapy will be more standard.

Prostate neoplasm; Cancer vaccines; Immunomodulation; Immunotherapy