Each year in the UK around 48,500 men are diagnosed with prostate cancer, and 11,900 die from this malignancy. The most common radical treatments for prostate cancer are surgical removal of the prostate gland (prostatectomy), or radiotherapy (usually combined with hormone treatment). However, there is a need to improve the overall patient outcomes from radical treatment, as many cases of high-risk prostate cancer recur. Moreover, there is an unmet clinical need to reduce radical treatment side effects.
Vascular targeted photodynamic therapy (VTP) is a novel minimally invasive precision surgery technique that has been developed to focally treat prostate cancer. VTP destroys the vasculature supply of blood to the tumour, thereby providing tumour control. To date, VTP has been investigated in clinical trials as a monotherapy for low-volume, low-risk prostate cancer. Whilst VTP has been combined with other treatments such as hormone therapy in pre-clinical models, to date it has not been investigated alongside external beam radiotherapy to assess the effects of combined treatment on prostate cancer tumour control.
A recent study from Associate Professor Richard Bryant and Professor Freddie Hamdy of the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, alongside collaborators in the Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Department of Oncology, and collaborators from the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel) and the National Cancer Institute (National Institutes of Health, USA), has investigated the impact of combining VTP with external beam radiotherapy treatment, and the potential improvement to treatment outcomes.
Read the full story on the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences website