Prof Nick James

Improving prostate cancer treatment

Professor Nick James is Professor of Clinical Oncology at the University of Birmingham and also Consultant in Clinical Oncology at the city’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital.

He is carrying out an important 8-year long trial looking at the use of hormone treatment for prostate cancer.

Prostate cancer claims 10,000 lives in the UK every year and is the most common cancer amongst UK men. If men have advanced, spreading prostate cancer they can be given a type of chemotherapy known as 'androgen suppression', which involves blocking the action of the male sex hormones. But the cancer often returns.

Professor James is carrying out a trial to see whether using certain drugs together with androgen suppression can prevent the disease from coming back and improve a man’s survival and quality of life.

The trial is called STAMPEDE - Systematic Therapy in Advancing or Metastatic Prostate cancer: Evaluation of Drug Efficacy. A pilot phase of the trial successfully showed that these drugs could be used together safely and effectively. Now Professor James’s team are recruiting 3,300 men for the main trial. STAMPEDE will look at 5 different drug combinations alongside androgen suppression, and also compare these therapies with treatment involving androgen suppression alone.

If STAMPEDE shows that a new drug combination is more effective than existing androgen suppression therapy, this could help prostate cancer patients in the UK and all over the world.

Find out more about androgen supression therapy on CancerHelp UK, our patient information website.