Dr. Paul Kelly

So INSPIRE is a clinical trial that's going to run across the country, both north and south.

And this has several novel aspects to it.

It's focusing on localised prostate cancer.

And this is a radiotherapy clinical trial.

And what it's doing is essentially utilising the best that we have in terms of radiation technology and applying that

to localize prostate cancer with a view to particularly focused on reducing treatment-related side effects.

So as many of your listeners will know, the prostate is located very close to the bladder and the rectum, the lower end of the bowel.

And this poses a problem when it comes to both surgery or radiation in that those areas

organs are in the firing line in terms of the potential to be harmed when we're attempting to cure prostate cancer.

So in my own area of radiation, this INSPIRE trial is aiming particularly at reducing treatment related side effects, and it is using several strategies to try and achieve that.

So as some of your listeners may know, the water pipe that men pass their urine through actually travels right down the centre of the prostate.

So immediately we have a problem.

We need to treat the prostate, but unfortunately that's travelling through the gland itself and unfortunately it receives the entire dose of radiation that we deliver and can cause some urinary side effects.

But now radiation technology has evolved that we can actually tell the computer that we want to minimize or reduce the dose in the area of that water pipe while simultaneously increasing the dose of radiation to the target that we can see on an MRI scan.

Yeah, so radiation is essentially the use of high-energy X-rays, and these are beams of radiation.

But nowadays, we can actually modulate radiation

the radiation beam to place dose extremely accurately on a target.

And even within millimeters of a tumor target, we can also simultaneously tell the beam and the computer that designs the treatment to minimize the dose in this area.

And the major advantage of that is really the ability to reduce treatment related side effects.

Yeah, so what's different about this trial is that whether we're using surgery or radiation, essentially for prostate cancer, these are whole gland treatments.