Skip to main content

Landmark clinical trial reports 33% prostate cancer survival benefit from novel hormone therapy

ENZAMET | CCTG PR17 (NCT02446405) clinical trial demonstrated that hormone therapy

Presented at ASCO 2019 the landmark ENZAMET | CCTG PR17 (NCT02446405) clinical trial demonstrated that hormone therapy with a drug called enzalutamide can improve the survival of some men with advanced, hormone‐sensitive prostate cancer. Findings, show that men with this sort of cancer who receive enzalutamide with standard treatment have a 33% improvement in survival compared to men receiving standard treatment alone.

“The benefits of enzalutamide had already been established for prostate cancers that are no longer responding to hormonal therapy,” said ENZAMET study co-chair, Professor Ian Davis from the lead group the Australian and New Zealand Urogenital and Prostate Cancer Trials Group (ANZUP). “The actual result in patients starting hormonal therapy noted that patients had a 60% improvement in the time it takes to detect the cancer growing again along with a 33% increase chance of survival was far higher than we expected.”

“This data represents an important advance in our knowledge of how to treat this stage of prostate cancer and we look forward to longer term follow-up data on survival and treatment side effects as well as quality of life,” says CCTG Senior Investigator Dr. Wendy Parulekar.

Prostate cancer is complex and so are the benefits, side effects and risks of multiple treatments. It is the most commonly diagnosed cancer among Canadian males with a projected 21,300 new cases in 2017. While three of four cases of prostate cancer in Canada are diagnosed at an early stage, there is an average of 1,187 stage IV diagnoses per year (according to the Canadian Cancer Society, Canadian Cancer Statistics: A 2018 special report).

“Clinical trials are the most effective way of determining which treatments, alone or in combination, will provide the greatest survival benefit to the patient with the least adverse outcomes.” Professor Christopher Sweeney, co‐chair of the ENZAMET trial, said, “This is one of the most significant findings yet in clinical trials for men with metastatic hormone‐sensitive prostate cancer – and a great example of effective international collaboration.”

Dr. Parulekar says, “The findings were made possible through the support of Canadian patients, their families and the national research community, and demonstrates the importance of cooperation in the conduct of meaningful clinical trial research.”

The results were presented in the Plenary Session at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Scientific Meeting in Chicago on June 2, 2019 and published simultaneously in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). ENZAMET | CCTG PR17 was a global collaborative investigator‐initiated trial led by ANZUP and included the Canadian Cancer Trials Group, Dana‐Farber Cancer Institute, and Cancer Trials Ireland.

Slides available here on the AZUP web site: