Yeah, so PACE-B came out of a series of about a decade of work trying to see how efficient and effective we can make prostate radiotherapy. And we’ve come a long way. The radiotherapy used to be given daily over eight weeks. And then a series of trials, including the UK-led CHIP trial, showed that we could safely do the same job, cure as many men in just four weeks...
Yeah, so PACE-B came out of a series of about a decade of work trying to see how efficient and effective we can make prostate radiotherapy. And we’ve come a long way. The radiotherapy used to be given daily over eight weeks. And then a series of trials, including the UK-led CHIP trial, showed that we could safely do the same job, cure as many men in just four weeks. So that made the treatment a lot easier for men with no more side effects. And so based on that research, the next obvious question is, can we go down below four weeks of daily treatment and cure men of prostate cancer in just five days of stereotactic body radiotherapy? And that was the question we wanted to ask and answer in the PACE trial. The PACE-B trial has now published its five-year outcomes. Five years is a good milestone after prostate cancer treatment. And what we thankfully saw was that men did a lot better than we thought they might do. So 96% had no evidence of cancer five years after treatment in the PACE-B trial after the five-fraction SBRT. And that was very similar to if the men had their treatment over four or even eight weeks of daily treatment. That was 95% of men cancer-free at five years. So really very encouraging results. And more importantly for these men, this was all achieved just with radiotherapy. So they didn’t need to have hormone therapy, which for most men is a more difficult treatment to go through than the radiotherapy itself. Now, the other side of the coin when you have a cancer that’s often cured is what about the side effects? How did the side effects compare in PACE-B? And what we saw was that the bowel side effects were very rare and no difference between the arms, but there were more bladder side effects for the men who had the shorter treatment. Now, these side effects that we’re talking about are not very severe side effects. It’s generally just the prescription of a medication, but still there was a difference for those men. And so that’s something important that we need to look into in future research.
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