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Will SansomPhone: (210) 567-2579
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Sansom@uthscsa.edu About four in 10 men who test positive for prostate cancer and undergo prostate removal will be found, on further analysis, to have cancer in adjacent cells. For decades, it has not been known how to best treat this group of men to prevent cancer spread.
Urologist Ian M. Thompson Jr., M.D., of the Health Science Center and the Cancer Therapy & Research Center (CTRC), and co-authors bring clarity to the issue with the publication of a study Dr. Thompson conceived and launched 20 years ago. “Adjuvant Radiotherapy for Pathologically Advanced Prostate Cancer: A Randomized Clinical Trial” will be released in the Nov. 15 issue of the
Journal of the American Medical Association.
The study enrolled 211 men who were assigned to the usual care and observation and who were to have radiotherapy only if their prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels showed a relapse. It also enrolled 214 men who were to receive radiotherapy after surgery without waiting for PSA levels to elevate. Although the study demonstrated that radiation did not achieve statistical significance in the reduction of men with subsequent spread of cancer, men assigned to immediate radiotherapy were found to be only half as likely to suffer PSA relapse and return of cancer as men assigned to observation.
“Radiotherapy after surgery had a significant effect on reducing cancer recurrence, preventing a whole series of additional hormone treatments that can have undesirable effects,”
said Dr. Thompson, a member of the San Antonio Cancer Institute (SACI), one of the two National Cancer Institute Cancer Centers in Texas. SACI is the academic oncology partnership of the Health Science Center and CTRC. The Southwest Oncology Group coordinated the study.
Four of the 12 authors are from the San Antonio Cancer Institute, and co-authors from other institutions routinely work with Dr. Thompson on research projects published in major journals. San Antonio authors include Dean Troyer, M.D., professor of pathology at the Health Science Center; Gregory Swanson, M.D., associate professor of radiation oncology and urology; and Edith Canby-Hagino, M.D., of the department of urology at Wilford Hall Medical Center.
“As the leading academic oncology center in the region, SACI is a major asset for the people of San Antonio and South Texas,” said Tyler Curiel, M.D., M.P.H., SACI director. “Dr. Thompson and other outstanding cancer researchers design and conduct clinical trials to improve treatments and rewrite the standard of care, and they invigorate our academic community. Because of discoveries made through the specialized research resources of the Health Science Center and the patient base of the CTRC, South Texas patients have access to the best and latest clinical care.”
Dr. Thompson wrote the draft of the study on a typewriter in 1986 as a fellow at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. “At the time, people said this is unnecessary because by the time you get results, we won’t be doing surgery or radiotherapy for prostate cancer anymore,” he said. “Yet, more men are affected today, we are still doing surgery and radiotherapy, and there are few randomized prostate cancer studies of this size and scope that speak not just to cancer recurrence but to the risk of later effects such as metastasis and death.”
Dr. Thompson holds the Henry B. and Edna Smith Dielmann Memorial Chair at the Health Science Center and the Glenda and Gary Woods Distinguished Chair in Genitourinary Oncology at the CTRC. He thanked the Southwest Oncology Group and the National Cancer Institute for the coordination and support necessary to do a study involving 425 men in multiple centers.
###The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio is the leading research institution in South Texas and one of the major health sciences universities in the world. With an operating budget of $500 million, the Health Science Center is the chief catalyst for the $14 billion biosciences and health care industry, the leading sector in San Antonio’s economy. The Health Science Center has had an estimated $34 billion impact on the region since inception and has expanded to six campuses in San Antonio, Laredo, Harlingen and Edinburg. More than 22,000 graduates (physicians, dentists, nurses, scientists and allied health professionals) serve in their fields, including many in Texas. Health Science Center faculty are international leaders in cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, aging, stroke prevention, kidney disease, orthopaedics, research imaging, transplant surgery, psychiatry and clinical neurosciences, pain management, genetics, nursing, allied health, dentistry and many other fields. For more information, visit
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About the Cancer Therapy & Research Center
Located in San Antonio, Texas, the Cancer Therapy & Research Center (CTRC) is one of the nation’s leading academic research and treatment centers, serving more than 4.4 million people in the high-growth corridor of Central and South Texas including Austin, San Antonio, Laredo and the Rio Grande Valley. CTRC handles more than 120,000 patient visits each year and is a world leader in developing new drugs to treat cancer. The CTRC Institute for Drug Development (IDD) is internationally recognized for conducting the largest oncology Phase I clinical drug trials program in the world. Fifteen of the cancer drugs most recently approved by the Food & Drug Administration underwent development or testing at the IDD. For more information, visit our Web site at
www.ctrc.net.
