Prostate cancer hope as patients could get painless treatment instead of chemo

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Men with advanced prostate cancer could be spared chemotherapy and could instead get a painless form of radiotherapy.

Currently patients with a form of the disease which has spread to one or two other parts of the body are assumed to be resistant to milder hormone therapy drugs. However researchers from The Royal Marsden hospitals in London suspect it may just be some tumours that are resistant.

They say that if the tumours are treated with precision stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT) the rest of the cancer will still respond to hormone drugs. SBRT allows clinicians to target tumours to sub-millimetre precision to deliver radiation with pinpoint accuracy.

This minimises the damage to surrounding healthy tissue and therefore side effects. The TRAP (targeting hormone resistant metastases with radiotherapy) trial of 81 men given the combination, instead of gruelling chemotherapy, had them then go 6.4 months without their cancers growing.

Some 40% of the patients from across the UK, had no evidence of cancer growth a year later. Head to head trials of the drug/SBRT combination and chemotherapy are now being planned. Chief investigator Dr Alison Tree, honorary reader at The Institute of Cancer Research, which was also involved in the research, said: "These initial results could be fantastic news.

"Radiotherapy is well tolerated and significant side effects are rare. We hope this treatment will in the future delay the need for chemotherapy, protecting quality of life for longer." The findings are being presented at the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology (ESTRO) annual congress in Glasgow.