INNOVATE trial Archives

Advanced Prostate Cancer Clinical Trials | Access and NRG-GU008 Trial from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

What’s the latest in ongoing advanced prostate cancer clinical trials? Expert Dr. Ronald Chen from KU Medical Center discusses ongoing trials, the INNOVATE trial and NRG-GU008 trial, clinical trial benefits, and patient advice for gaining clinical trial access.

[ACT]IVATION TIP

“…ask if clinical trial is not available at your local cancer center, see if a second opinion through telehealth with a larger cancer center is possible, so that you can learn about clinical trial options and see if that’s something that you want to pursue.”

Related Resources:

Expert Perspective | Aggressive Prostate Cancer Research and Health Equity

Understanding the Role of a Digital Rectal Exam in Prostate Cancer Care

How Can Prostate Cancer Screening Access Be Increased?

Transcript:

Lisa Hatfield:

Dr. Chen, can you talk about any clinical trials that are ongoing for people who are living with advanced prostate cancer? And in particular, any trials that you or your colleagues are doing right now that would be of interest to this audience? And my last part to that question is, if they are not able to access those easily, do you have suggestions for patients to access those clinical trials if they’re working with a local community cancer center?

Dr. Ronald Chen:

I think having access to clinical trials is very important for every cancer patient and especially patients who have advanced cancer. And the reason I think this is really important is because in advanced cancer, we’re not doing as well as we want to in terms of extending survival and potentially even curing some patients. We’re not doing as well as we want to, and there’s a lot of room for improvement. And the only way to improve the outcomes for patients with advanced cancer is through clinical trials. Clinical trials is where patients can access first new promising treatments that are not currently available widely because it’s not yet FDA-approved.

And so, I think access to clinical trials is important and often offers a hope for patients because of a new promising agent that they could access through the trial. So I think that’s really important. And there are actually multiple…there are actually a lot of open clinical trials ongoing around the U.S. for patients with advanced cancer, testing new drugs, testing new ways to deliver treatment. I absolutely believe that there will be a new treatment approved for advanced prostate cancer probably every year for years to come because of all the new trials that are happening because of all the new promising agents that have been developed, being tested right now. So I think that’s really important.

I want to highlight a couple of examples of trials, but again, there’s so many, it’s hard to talk about all of them. But I’ll highlight a couple. There’s one trial sponsored by the National Cancer Institute for patients with no positive prostate cancer, which is when prostate cancer has spread to the lymph nodes, and the trial is called NRG-GU008, we call it the INNOVATE trial; and for patients with no positive prostate cancer, even though the cancer has spread to lymph nodes, this is actually a group of stage IV prostate cancer patients where there actually is still a hope for cure. We could actually still cure some patients with no positive prostate cancer. And the goal of this trial is to improve that cure rate.

So maybe right now, with aggressive treatment for these patients, maybe we can cure 50 percent of these patients in this trial that will incorporate a new drug that seems promising, we’re hoping that maybe improves the cure rate higher, maybe to 70 percent or higher. And so, I think that is a really important trial for patients who have that specific diagnosis.

In terms of for patients who live maybe in an area that…where the local cancer center does not offer clinical trials, I think there’s still opportunity for them to learn about clinical trials and even participate. And what I would advocate for is to ask for a second opinion.

Second opinions in cancer is now actually pretty commonly available because of the arrival of telehealth. Even if you live in maybe a small rural area, you can still request a telehealth consultation from a larger cancer center by telephone, by video, and through that, you can ask about clinical trials that are available. And I think it’s important to pursue that, to learn about the options, to learn if there’s a new treatment that could be available to you before you make a final decision on choosing treatment. So with telehealth, second opinion, learning about options, I think there’s actually opportunities to access clinical trials that way.

So my activation tip for this question is, ask if a clinical trial is not available at your local cancer center, see if a second opinion through telehealth with a larger cancer center is possible, so that you can learn about clinical trial options and see if that’s something that you want to pursue.

Share Your Feedback

Transcript:

Lisa Hatfield:

Dr. Chen, can you provide an overview of your research focus around improving treatments and cure rates for patients facing an aggressive prostate cancer diagnosis? And also, two parts to this question. What inspired you to focus on the topic of health equity in relation to prostate cancer?

Dr. Ronald Chen:

Well, in terms of thinking about my research on improving treatments for advanced prostate cancer, and I’ll just define that to say, advanced prostate cancer, we usually think of as patients who have prostate cancer that has spread to other parts of the body. And so that’s often very aggressive. And, of course, in that situation, there’s still a lot of room for us to improve treatment so we can extend the survival and also improve the quality of life for these patients as much as we can. So a lot of room for improvement. And really, I think how we get to that improvement is mostly through clinical trials.

There’s a lot of promising new treatments that are more effective in tackling the cancer that also potentially can improve the patient’s quality of life, which is also a very important situation for advanced prostate cancer. And so a lot of my research really focuses on clinical trials to incorporate new treatments or new ways to do treatment for patients with advanced prostate cancer.

I’ll give one example. I lead a national trial that’s sponsored by the National Cancer Institute. It’s called NRG-GU008. We call it the INNOVATE trial. And this trial is specifically for patients who have prostate cancer that has spread to the lymph nodes. And if you have prostate cancer that has spread to the lymph nodes, that’s technically stage IV. And we, again, don’t do as well as we want to for these patients. And what this trial is testing is standard of care which would involve radiation and hormone therapy compared to standard of care, radiation/hormone therapy, plus a new drug that seems to hold promise for prostate cancer.

And, of course, we’re testing to see whether adding this new drug would reduce further spread of the cancer, improve survival, and how it impacts quality of life. And so, that’s a very important effort for no positive prostate cancer patients. And we are trying to enroll almost 600 patients, and so far we’re about 200 patients into it. So it’s an ongoing trial. It’s open across the country. And I really do hope that at the end of this trial, we’ll be able to offer a new option for these patients.

I’m involved in other trials around the country that are testing other treatments for advanced prostate cancer. And a lot of my focus on these other trials is also to sort of assess the impact of these treatments on the patient’s quality of life. I think quality of life is really important. We don’t just want to focus on being more aggressive and more aggressive and more aggressive without accounting for how the aggressive treatment really impacts a patient, how their quality of life is and side effects. And so that’s also another really important focus of my research and clinical trials.

In terms of my focus on health equity, health equity is a really important topic because even though we have pretty good treatment for prostate cancer, we know that not all patients have the same access to treatment, and not all patients have the same outcome with advanced prostate cancer. And so, studying why there is a disparity where some patient groups don’t do as well. We know for a fact that based on multiple studies, that Black patients with prostate cancer are more likely to die from prostate cancer twice as much as white patients with prostate cancer.

So we want to understand why, and once we understand why, we want to design interventions to reduce that gap, so then all patients have the same access and have good outcomes with this disease. And so I think that relates to access to screening. So we can diagnose cancer as early as we can. It relates to access to clinical trials, and that’s another really important aspect of my research focus.

Tag Archive for: INNOVATE trial

Advanced Prostate Cancer Clinical Trials | Access and NRG-GU008 Trial

[ACT]IVATION TIP

Related Resources:

Transcript:

Expert Perspective | Aggressive Prostate Cancer Research and Health Equity

Related Resources:

Transcript:

CONNECT WITH US