The biggest prostate cancer screening trial in decades has been launched in the UK, with the goal of finding the best way to detect the disease.
The £42m Transform trial will recruit men aged 50-74, with a lower age limit of 45 for black men, whose risk of developing and dying from prostate cancer is doubled compared with that of white men. The trial’s recruitment will involve GPs inviting men to join the study; the first letters of invitation have already been sent out.
The trial is funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research and Prostate Cancer UK.
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men, but it is also one of the only cancers without a reliable screening method. PSA tests, which search for abnormally high levels of protein in the blood, can be requested by men over 50, but these tests are unreliable, missing prostate cancers that need treatment and picking up those that do not. The Transform trial will use new methods to search for prostate cancer by investigating how PSA testing could be combined with rapid MRI scans of the prostate in order to improve diagnostic accuracy. The trial will also compare the accuracy of PSA tests with spit tests, which extract DNA from saliva.
Matthew Hobbs, director of research at Prostate Cancer UK, said: “We hear from men who were diagnosed late, whose lives may have been saved if they’d been screened or tested earlier. We also hear from a lot of men who have suffered incontinence or impotence because of treatments they had. Some of those men didn’t need to have those treatments, and that’s the harm that we need to try to avoid.”
The Transform trial’s initial results are expected in around two years, following which the trial will be expanded to up to 300,000 men nationwide.
Hashim Ahmed, the trial’s chief investigator, said: “The start of recruitment marks a pivotal step towards getting the results men urgently need to make prostate cancer diagnosis safe and more effective so that we can unlock the potential of prostate cancer screening in the UK.”