Movember funds AI research to speed up personalised medicines for prostate cancer

We’re proud to have supported ground-breaking new research which harnesses the use of artificial intelligence to speed up the development of personalised treatments for prostate cancer.

The STRATOSPHere project, led by Professor Gerhardt Attard at University College London, is aiming to accelerate the progress of precision treatments so that men with advanced prostate cancer could be offered treatment matched to the specific biology of their cancer sooner than previously hoped.

Researchers on STRATOSPHere are analysing different types of prostate cancers from thousands of tumour and blood samples donated by men who participated in a trial called STAMPEDE.

Although the STAMPEDE trial was hugely successful in discovering which treatment regimens worked best, on average, and led to more life-extending options being made available, there was no way of predicting which of those specific treatments was most effective for individual men.

Now, the STRATOSPHere team has made a significant leap by using a revolutionary artificial intelligence tool made by US company ArteraAI to examine the data from STAMPEDE.

Presented at the 2023 European Society for Medical Oncology Congress in Madrid, Spain, latest results from the STRATOSPHere project revealed that the tool was able to identify men who are responding to current treatment and are unlikely to die from prostate cancer. More importantly, it can also identify men who aren’t responding to the treatment and will require alternative treatment options to stop disease progression.

Professor Attard said: “We are working to unravel the biological characteristics and differences between the cancers of the individual men on the STAMPEDE trial, with a view to predicting which precise, personalised treatments will work best for each man. This ability to better predict the behaviour of a cancer from routinely performed tests could be a game-changer.”

Dr Sarah Hsiao, Director of Biomedical Research and Impact at Movember, said: “Being able to predict what might happen for men with aggressive prostate cancer is incredibly important. Movember is proud to have supported the STRATOSPHere team’s innovative research, which employs state-of-the-art technology to develop a tool that can assist men with prostate cancer and their doctors to have more informed conversations around treatment choices.”

“This is a significant step towards the concept of providing the right treatment for the right men at the right time. We look forward to further research on how this could be applied in standard healthcare practices to improve outcomes for prostate cancer.”

The STRATOSPHere project is supported by £1.30m in funding from Movember and Prostate Cancer UK.

Dr Matthew Hobbs, Director of Research at Prostate Cancer UK, said: “1 in 8 men will get prostate cancer, but the disease is seriously lagging behind other cancers in terms of precision medicine, a situation which is causing avoidable death and harm. We very deliberately invested with Movember in 2017 to try to close this gap by funding STRATOSPHere, and I’m delighted to see such impressive and impactful results coming from that decision."