(UroToday.com) The Advanced Prostate Cancer Consensus Conference 2021 meeting session discussing PSMA in diagnostics and therapy included a presentation by Dr. Derya Tilki discussing background information of PSMA imaging and providing context for the subsequent presentations in this session. Dr. Tilki started by highlighting that PSMA is a transmembrane protein with enzymatic function as a folate hydrolase-carboxypeptidase, with a short cytoplasmic domain, a hydrophobic transmembrane region, and a large extracellular domain. PSMA is highly expressed on prostate epithelial cells and is strongly upregulated in prostate cancer (~1000-fold higher expression compared with other tissues). Interestingly, PSMA was recognized as a target >3 decades ago. The short intracellular domain contains a binding site that can be targeted with 7E11 antibodies, and in 1996 ProstaScint (111In-labelled 7E11) was approved by the FDA (the first commercial monoclonal PSMA antibody), but only reaches the cells that are already in apoptosis:

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