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ANZUP ANNUAL REPORT 2020
AT A GLANCE
Chief Executive Officer’s Report “ANZUP’s approach to all of its clinical trials is to centre the research question on its value to the community”. ANZUP’s ENZAMET trial was again recognised by ASCO on World Cancer Day (4 February 2020) in its Clinical Cancer Advances 2020: ASCO’s Annual Report on Progress Against Cancer. The report highlighted the most important clinical research advances of the past year and identified priority areas where ASCO believes research efforts should be focused moving forward.
As the decade drew to a close and we leapt into the 20’s, ANZUP not only grew in terms of trials and membership but also achieved a number of significant milestones over the past 12 months. In June 2019, we celebrated a major achievement with our ENZAMET trial featuring as a Plenary Session at the 2019 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting. It certainly propelled us onto the international stage! Special thanks to the Study Co-chairs, Ian Davis and Christopher Sweeney for their commitment and leadership and to our local and international investigators from across the 85 sites, our collaborators at the NHMRC CTC, Cancer Trials Ireland and the Canadian Cancer Trials Group, and to the 1125 patients who participated on the trial. Our thanks to Astellas for their support in terms of funding and product to conduct both the ENZAMET (ANZUP 1304) and ENZARAD (ANZUP 1303) trials. In December 2019 enzalutamide received U.S. FDA approval for treatment of men with metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer, this decision being supported by data from the ENZAMET trial. A great achievement and one we hope to see followed by other countries around the world including Australia and New Zealand.
You can read more about ENZAMET and these achievements from page 28. ANZUP’s clinical trials portfolio continues to grow across the major cancers we represent. Currently we have 7 ANZUP-led active and recruiting trials, 4 co-badged trials, 8 protocols in development, 31 concepts presented across 6 concept development workshops; and 6 Below the Belt Research Grants awarded in July 2019. During the course of the year three of our trials reached their recruitment targets; TheraP (ANZUP 1603), UNISoN (ANZUP 1602) and Pain Free TRUS B (ANZUP 1501). In September 2019 the last patient was randomised to our TheraP trial, five months ahead of schedule. At the time of writing this report, Study Chair Michael Hofman has been offered an oral presentation of the interim study results at the 2020 Virtual ASCO meeting in May 2020. A wonderful collaboration between ANZUP and the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia with support from Movember, It’s a Bloke Thing Foundation, Can4Cancer, Endocyte (A Novartis Company), Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO). Congratulations to Michael and the multidisciplinary team of investigators, study coordinators, nuclear medicine technologists, radiopharmacists, clinical research associates and data managers.
ANZUP is committed to finding better treatments for our patients and their families affected by GU cancer through our clinical trials research.
