Alison Birtle, Consultant Oncologist at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals has been awarded the First Prize for the Best Abstract (Oncology) by the EAU Scientific Congress Office for her work on the POUT trial.
The POUT trial is the largest and only large scale randomised trial within this patient group; looking at the impact of chemotherapy after surgery for cancer of the upper urinary tract system.
The Cancer Centre at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals is the cancer centre for Lancashire and South Cumbria; and was the lead site in the UK for this trial. We recruited 19 patients into the study, making us the largest recruiting site and the NHS host site for the trial. The trial was funded by Cancer Research UK and sponsored by the Institute of Cancer Research, London.
Alison led the research, alongside her full time work at the Cancer Centre, and has been heavily involved in promoting the study nationally to bring the research community behind a study in this niche patient group.
Alison presented the ground breaking results of the trial at the 33rd Annual EAU Congress of the European Association of Urology in Copenhagen last month, attended by 15,000 delegates; where she was awarded with the First Prize for the Best Abstract for Oncology. Alison said: “It has been a fantastic opportunity to work on such a large, practice changing trial. The trial aimed to recruit 336 people from across the UK; however the Independent Data Monitoring Committee met in October last year and advised that key results were robust enough to stop recruitment to the trial.
Thus, the study was closed early in November with 261 patients participating from 71 different centres across the UK.
The findings from the study show that adjuvant chemotherapy improves disease free survival significantly, with 71% of patients remaining disease free at two years in the chemotherapy arm, compared with 54% in the surveillance arm. Lancashire Teaching Hospitals have played a pivotal part in leading this study for the UK and I am absolutely thrilled with the results.
This study will have a huge impact on both current and future patient’s lives.” Karen Partington, Chief Executive at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals said: “We are delighted that we are able to play such a big part in innovation and in developing ground-breaking treatments and results for the future through involvement in such practice changing clinical trials.
We are committed to research and innovation within our hospitals, and to have such great results in this trial is absolutely fantastic and a credit to Alison and the teams involved.”