STAMPEDE is a long-running trial in advanced prostate cancer, in which nearly 12,000 men have taken part. Thanks to its multi-arm multi-stage platform design, STAMPEDE has tested many different treatments and directly led to improvements in the standard of prostate cancer care several times.

This Trial Talk podcast mini-series will explore the trial’s journey from its inception in the early 2000s to the end of patient recruitment in March 2023.

In the final part, Max Parmar and Nick James look back over the trial’s impact on clinical practice and platform trial design and look forward to STAMPEDE2, sharing their hopes for the future of prostate cancer research.

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Further information is available on the STAMPEDE study page at www.mrcctu.ucl.ac.uk

For questions or feedback on the series, message us at [email protected]

For more information and to access the transcript: bit.ly/3OQWhV8

As a listener, your opinion is very valuable to us. Please help us to improve the podcast in future by filling in this short survey: forms.office.com/e/PjfjQ5Mn6g

STAMPEDE is a long-running trial in advanced prostate cancer, in which nearly 12,000 men have taken part. Thanks to its multi-arm multi-stage platform design, STAMPEDE has tested many different treatments and directly led to improvements in the standard of prostate cancer care several times.

This Trial Talk podcast mini-series will explore the trial’s journey from its inception in the early 2000s to the end of patient recruitment in March 2023.

Part 2 is about patient and public involvement (PPI) in the trial. David Matheson, a Reader at the University of Wolverhampton and STAMPEDE patient representative, shares his insight into the work this entails and why it is so important to champion the voices of patients. We also hear about PPI from the perspective of trial researchers, Max Parmar and Nick James.

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Further information is available on the STAMPEDE study page at www.mrcctu.ucl.ac.uk

For questions or feedback on the series, message us at [email protected]

For more information and to access the transcript: bit.ly/3OQWhV8

As a listener, your opinion is very valuable to us. Please help us to improve the podcast in future by filling in this short survey: forms.office.com/e/PjfjQ5Mn6g

STAMPEDE is a long-running trial in advanced prostate cancer, in which nearly 12,000 men have taken part. Thanks to its multi-arm multi-stage platform design, STAMPEDE has tested many different treatments and directly led to improvements in the standard of prostate cancer care several times.

This Trial Talk podcast mini-series will explore the trial’s journey from its inception in the early 2000s to the end of patient recruitment in March 2023.

Part 1 covers the landscape of prostate cancer treatment before STAMPEDE, as well how the trial was designed, featuring two researchers who lead the methodological and clinical sides of the trial: Max Parmar, Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology and Director of the MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL and UCL's Institute of Clinical Trials and Methodology, and Nick James, Professor of Prostate and Bladder Cancer Research at the Institute of Cancer Research.

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Further information is available on the STAMPEDE study page at www.mrcctu.ucl.ac.uk

For questions or feedback on the series, message us at [email protected]

For more information and to access the transcript: https://bit.ly/3OQWhV8

As a listener, your opinion is very valuable to us. Please help us to improve the podcast in future by filling in this short survey: forms.office.com/e/PjfjQ5Mn6g

Immunotherapy drugs fight cancer by helping the immune system recognise and attack cancer cells. These drugs have revolutionised cancer treatment over the last decade, improving survival for many people with different types of cancer. However, researchers are still unsure of the best way to give immunotherapy, which can come with unpredictable side effects.

In this episode, Clinical Fellow Sophie Merrick discusses how the REFINE trial hopes to address this problem, by testing if giving immunotherapy less frequently can still treat the cancer effectively, whilst improving the quality of life for patients, reducing side effects and costs.

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Further information is available on the REFINE study page at www.mrcctu.ucl.ac.uk

For questions or feedback on the series, message us at [email protected]

For more information and to access the transcript: https://bit.ly/3DgIDE2

As a listener, your opinion is very valuable to us. Please help us to improve the podcast in future by filling in this short survey: https://forms.office.com/e/PjfjQ5Mn6g

Running a clinical trial means collecting a lot of data from the trial participants. But some of this data might be collected and stored in healthcare systems, as well as in clinical trial case report forms.

What if we could avoid this doubling up, save time and resources, improve recruitment and reduce missing data?

In this episode we explore the opportunities and challenges of using healthcare systems data in clinical trials, with Dr Macey Murray and Professor Matt Sydes.

Resources:

British Heart Foundation Data Science Centre webinar (Macey Murray) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzQeMUUG7tQ

How to get your own crocheted duck - https://twitter.com/drmakerbaker/status/1628122224971419665?s=20

For more questions or feedback on the series, contact us at [email protected]

For more information and access to the transcript of this episode: https://bit.ly/3NKtKjs

As a listener, your opinion is very valuable to us. Please help us to improve the podcast in future by filling in this short survey: https://forms.office.com/e/PjfjQ5Mn6g

Neonatal sepsis is a life-threatening infection that affects up to 3 million babies per year globally.

In an effort to identify better treatments, the NeoSep1 clinical trial evaluates new antibiotic combinations for newborn babies with sepsis. To learn more about the trial, we speak to Adrie Bekker and Cristina Obiero, principal investigators of the trial in South Africa and Kenya, Reenu Thomas, a neonatologist from South Africa, and Francesca Schiavone, the clinical project manager of the NeoSep1 trial in London.

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Further information about the NeoSep1 clinial trial is available at www.mrcctu.ucl.ac.uk and https://gardp.org/.

For questions or feedback on the series, message us at [email protected]

For more information and to access the transcript: https://bit.ly/3MSKkw5

As a listener, your opinion is very valuable to us. Please help us to improve the podcast in future by filling in this short survey: https://forms.office.com/e/PjfjQ5Mn6g

214,000 newborn babies die of sepsis caused by infections that are resistant to antibiotics every year. This is a major problem worldwide, but disproportionally affects low- and middle- income countries.

Reenu Thomas and Adrie Bekker, two neonatologists from South Africa, and Francesca Schiavone, clinical project manager at the MRC CTU at UCL in London, discuss the challenges of treating neonatal sepsis and present the results from an observational study (NeoOBS), which assessed mortality rates of babies with sepsis.

Further information about the NeoOBS study is available at www.mrcctu.ucl.ac.uk and https://gardp.org/.

For questions or feedback on the series, message us at [email protected]

For more information and to access the transcript: https://bit.ly/45zdn0j

As a listener, your opinion is very valuable to us. Please help us to improve the podcast in future by filling in this short survey: https://forms.office.com/e/PjfjQ5Mn6g

For World TB Day, this episode explores the global burden of tuberculosis (TB) and how growing antibiotic resistance can complicate treatment options. Andrew Nunn, a Professor of Epidemiology, discusses his work on the STREAM2 trial, which investigated how treatment for multi-drug resistant TB could be shortened and made more acceptable for patients.

Further information is available on the STREAM Stage 2 study page at www.mrcctu.ac.uk and results from STREAM2 are published open access in The Lancet.

For questions or feedback on the series, message us at [email protected]

For more information and to access the transcript: http://bit.ly/3TDnz24

As a listener, your opinion is very valuable to us. Please help us to improve the podcast in future by filling in this short survey: https://forms.office.com/e/PjfjQ5Mn6g

Around 4000 women die of ovarian cancer in the UK each year. It is often diagnosed at an advanced stage, making treatment difficult. The UK Collaborative Trial of Ovarian Cancer Screening, known as the UKCTOCS trial, followed up more than 200,000 women over an average of 16 years, in an effort to improve diagnosis of ovarian cancer. This podcast episode explores the long-term results of the trial.

Andrew Nunn joined the MRC’s Tuberculosis & Chest Diseases Unit as a statistician in 1966. During the next 20 years he was directly involved in the design, conduct and analysis of the programme of trials conducted under the leadership of Professors Wallace Fox and Denny Mitchison in East Africa, Hong Kong and Singapore which led to the worldwide adoption of short course chemotherapy for tuberculosis.

Following the closure of that unit he joined the MRC’s Uganda AIDS Programme which researched the dynamics of the HIV epidemic in a rural African environment. On his return to the UK he became head of the Division Without Portfolio within the newly formed MRC Clinical Trials Unit with responsibility for developing trials in neglected areas.

Andrew is Co-Chief Investigator of STREAM, the first randomised controlled-trial of a treatment regimen for multi-drug resistant TB. In the context of treatment guidelines based on ‘very low quality’ evidence, Andrew designed STREAM to generate gold-standard evidence on the safety and efficacy of the promising 9-month short-course regimen previously evaluated only in observational studies. The trial has subsequently been adapted to test a bedaquiline-containing oral regimen.