Along with patients at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, patients at the James Cook Cancer Institute in Middlesbrough are among the first in the UK to receive the medicine, called Lutetium (177Lu) rhPSMA-10.1 Injection.
This investigational therapy is a type of radioactive treatment intended to find and attack prostate cancer cells. It sends radiation directly to the cancer, while aiming to limit damage to healthy organs.
This targeted approach aims to treat the cancer more precisely than standard treatments.
Early studies are promising and now the phase 2 trial is being carried out to check its safety, how well it works, and the best way to use it.
Some patients will be given higher or more frequent doses to see if this helps improve outcomes.
Darren Leaning, consultant clinical oncologist at The James Cook University Hospital, said:
“It is truly a privilege to be one of a few UK sites selected to treat patients with this novel targeted molecular radiotherapy compound.
“We already know that this type of targeted radiopharmaceutical therapy has been shown to be an effective treatment in men with advanced prostate cancer that evades control from hormone-based therapies.
“What is exciting about this novel version of Lutetium-PSMA and the trial we are enrolling eligible patients into is that it has been engineered to try and deliver the radiation as efficiently as possible.
“The trial is therefore trying to help confirm this further, but in addition is also exploring different administration schedules and then reviewing how these different schedules impact both treatment effectiveness (improving patients quality of life and reducing measurable disease) along with us learning about how the drug is absorbed within both the cancer cells and normal cells to help us in the future.
“In the future, we hope radiopharmaceutical therapies become a treatment option for a variety of cancer types and our nuclear medicine and trials team at the James Cook Cancer Institute are working hard to ensure that we are able to stay at the forefront of developments in this field and to be ready when drugs like this become available to much larger patient populations.”
Prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers in men, and new treatments are needed, especially for advanced disease.
Researchers hope that targeted radioactive treatments like this one could give patients with advanced disease more options in the future.
The treatment is being developed by Blue Earth Therapeutics, an Oxford, UK-based company that specialises in radioactive cancer medicines.
