6
ANZUP ANNUAL REPORT 2022
AT A GLANCE
Chief Executive Officer’s Report While ANZUP’s portfolio of high-quality cutting edge clinical trials continued to grow across the cancers we focus, most importantly we have several new trials at various stages of development with a number of concepts in pipeline that will progress throughout 2022/2023.
ANZUP exists to improve outcomes for people affected by below the belt cancers (bladder, kidney, testicular, penile and prostate). We do this by performing clinical trials to generate the evidence which can make a difference to people whose lives are affected by these cancers. Over the last 12 months, despite the ongoing challenges and implications of COVID across all sectors, including clinical trials, ANZUP through the extraordinary efforts of many, has managed to achieve some significant milestones. In terms of our clinical trials research, some highlights included: we reached recruitment targets for our UNISoN and PCRMIB trials with planning well underway for translational sub-studies; we opened at Nottingham University Hospital in the United Kingdom to help bolster recruitment for our BCG MM trial – recently reaching 80% of its recruitment target; we signed off on a large translational program of work for our ENZAMET trial bringing together expert project teams from across the world; we opened CLIMATE, our new testicular cancer biomarker study and as at 31 March it has already recruited seven out of the target 200 patients; we held the first investigator meeting for our soon to open EVOLUTION trial; and we continued to build on our international collaborations with the Canadian Cancer Trials Group, Cancer Trials Ireland, and our newly established partner, the Prostate Cancer Clinical Trial Consortium at Memorial Sloan Kettering in the United States to open our DASL-HiCaP trial. It’s worth highlighting that we opened the trial in March 2020 and incredibly have reached over 40% of the recruitment target of 1,100 patients (as at 31 March 2022) – an amazing achievement.
In line with our strategic plan ANZUP supports the coming together of our multidisciplinary membership, including our consumer advisory panel, to bring new trial ideas forward for development. These annual Concept Development Workshop’s (CDW’s) provide a mechanism for us to continue to examine the evidence – current and future treatment and management- identify gaps, ensuring we remain patient centred while addressing critical clinical questions. These CDW’s are extraordinarily valuable to our experienced researchers however are a wonderful opportunity for our upand-coming future leaders. As a consequence, ANZUP also supports our fellows/trainees/junior researchers to attend these workshops. The CDW’s are currently underway across all subcommittees. We were successful with our Cancer Australia grant application for infrastructure funding for 2022-2024. This funding is extremely valuable however every time our members come up with a new trial idea we need to find the funds to conduct the trial. Cancer Australia’s priorities for this period are to identify and develop cancer clinical trial protocols that address the healthcare system’s most important cancer clinical questions and reduce disparities in cancer outcomes, including Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander and Culturally and linguistically diverse people. ANZUP’s membership continued to grow and at the time of writing this report we are coming close to reaching 2000 members crossing all disciplines and craft groups. Our #ANZUP21 Annual Scientific Meeting had to once again be flipped to a virtual event! However that didn’t diminish the enthusiasm of our members. We welcomed ~400 delegates to the meeting to hear the latest cutting edge management of GU research. There were many great sessions over the course of the 2 days with one of the highlights being a panel discussion addressing “Disparities in Cancer Care” with a focus on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This gave a marvellous insight into how Indigenous people in Australia experience cancer care. This generated much discussion about potential causes of these differences and how ANZUP can work towards addressing these gaps.
