Using a blood-based test to personalise treatment for advanced prostate cancer

Grant information

Institution - University College London
Researcher - Professor Gerhardt Attard
Grant Award - £859,367.00
Duration of Funding - 2018-2024
Status - Complete
Reference - MA-TR15-007

Why did we fund this project?

• Currently, doctors mainly rely on PSA blood tests to understand whether a treatment is working. However, PSA levels can take time to go down, meaning it may not be immediately clear when a treatment has stopped working.

• That’s why we funded Professor Gert Attard and his team to investigate whether tiny fragments of DNA shed by prostate cancer cells into the blood, known as circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA), could provide an earlier warning that the cancer is starting to grow again.

What did the researchers do?

• Between 2019 and 2023, 114 men with advanced prostate cancer who were starting hormone therapy plus docetaxel or an androgen receptor pathway inhibitor (ARPI) were recruited to the PARADIGM study.

• The researchers collected blood samples at several time points and analysed them for both circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) and PSA.

What did the researchers achieve?

• The team showed that men who still had ctDNA in their blood after 6–12 weeks of treatment were at greater risk of their cancer progressing than men with undetectable ctDNA.

• Combining ctDNA and PSA test results helped the researchers identify a small group of men whose cancer was around 20 times more likely to grow and spread than men with undetectable ctDNA levels.

How will this benefit men?

• Monitoring ctDNA could help identify men at higher risk of their cancer progressing earlier, allowing doctors to offer additional treatment sooner, to those most likely to benefit while helping others avoid unnecessary treatment.

• The research team is now working to show how this blood test could be used reliably in larger numbers of men by rolling it out in other clinical trials.