Below the Belt Research Fund
ANZUP’s 2020 Below the Belt Research Fund Recipients
BELOW THE BELT RESEARCH FUND RECIPIENTS PRESENTING ON THEIR PROJECTS AT THE ANZUP ANNUAL SCIENTIFIC MEETING.
ANZUP brings together a leading multi-disciplinary network of oncology, surgical, medical, radiation, nursing, psychology and allied health professionals from within the urogenital cancer field to conduct vital research through clinical trials. Clinical trials are essential for discovering new treatments for diseases, as well as new ways to detect, diagnose, and reduce the chance of developing the disease. Clinical trials can show researchers what does and doesn’t work in humans that cannot be learned in animals or in the laboratory, and at the same time test for any potential side effects. Clinical trials are expensive, often costing millions of dollars. ANZUP receives some funding from the Australian Government, and this provides useful support but comes nowhere near covering our basic costs. And importantly, government infrastructure support funds cannot be used to run clinical trials. Every clinical trial we do needs to have its own funding. This is why ANZUP has fundraising events. Some of our fundraising goes to support researchers who do not have other means to support their research. And other funds raised through the Below the Belt events supports ideas that are not yet fully fledged clinical trials but might evolve into them. This is one way we continue to grow ideas for future work. The Below the Belt Research Fund has supported many members in the development of investigator-initiated studies. This year, it has provided much needed seed funding to support five ANZUP members to progress new trial ideas to the point of becoming full scale studies. We would like to congratulate the recipients and below you can read about four of these studies.
PRIMARY 2: A prospective, multicentre, randomised study of Ga-68 PSMA /CT + mpMRI vs mpMRI alone for prostate cancer diagnosis. Louise Emmett and Michael Hofman MRI is now routinely utilised for the diagnosis of prostate cancer in Australia. However, it still misses about 15-20% of important cancers, and about half of the biopsies undertaken after MRI are negative, because MRI is not completely accurate. PSMA PET is a new technique that is helpful in staging men who have already been diagnosed with prostate cancer. The PRIMARY trial currently underway - is assessing the value of PSMA PET in men who are suspected of having prostate cancer, and are undergoing both an MRI and a prostate biopsy. This trial proposes to randomise men between MRI + biopsy (if required) - the current standard of care in Australia, and MRI /PSMA + biopsy (if required). The study hypothesis is that PSMA MRI will both reduce unnecessary biopsies and improve accuracy of prostate cancer diagnosis, compared to using MRI alone. Also, a health economics analysis to assess cost to the community and QOL for men with prostate cancer is an important component of this trial. To date, the study has enrolled 230/309 men, and the results are looking promising for combination of PSMA and MRI to be more accurate than MRI alone in diagnosing important prostate cancers. There is the potential for imaging to play a much bigger role in diagnosis of prostate cancer and for the number of biopsies required to be safely reduced.
A LITTLE BELOW THE BELT 59
