Around 7,000 more men with prostate cancer in England will be eligible to be treated with abiraterone each year, after NHS England announced it will offer the drug to men with high-risk prostate cancer that hasn’t spread.

Our scientists discovered and developed abiraterone, which takes away the fuel many prostate cancers use to grow, in the 1990s. Although it can’t cure prostate cancer, abiraterone can stop the disease from growing or spreading any further. That means it can help some men live longer, healthier lives even when they don’t have any other treatment options.

When it was first approved as a treatment in the early 2010s, abiraterone was only used to treat some advanced, metastatic prostate cancers (which have spread to another part of the body). Then, in 2022, our long-running STAMPEDE trial showed that abiraterone could also be an effective way to stop some high-risk prostate cancers that are still localised in the prostate. Adding abiraterone to these men’s treatment halved the risk of their cancer coming back and cut their risk of dying by 40%.

Those results, and a drop in the price of abiraterone when its patent expired, helped convince the NHS in Scotland and Wales to offer the drug more widely in 2023. Today’s announcement means NHS England will now do the same.

What is abiraterone and how does it work?

Abiraterone is a unique type of hormone therapy that stops the body producing testosterone, the male sex hormone that can stimulate prostate cancer cells to grow. Prostate cancers that rely on testosterone in this way are called “hormone sensitive”.

Other hormone therapies also target testosterone, but abiraterone is the only drug capable of stopping prostate cancer cells from producing the hormone for themselves. That can make it harder for high-risk or hard-to-treat prostate cancers to adapt and resist abiraterone than other similar drugs.

Abiraterone was first discovered by scientists we helped fund at the Institute of Cancer Research in the mid-1990s. A team at our Strathclyde Formulation Unit then developed it into a pill. After that, we helped support the initial phase I and II clinical trials at the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden hospital, before the costly phase III trials were carried out with the help of the pharmaceutical industry.

We’ve continued to study how best to use abiraterone since it was first approved for some men in 2012 – including through our STAMPEDE trial, which has repeatedly helped change how the drug is used. One of the biggest steps forward came in 2017, when STAMPEDE showed that giving men with advanced hormone-sensitive prostate cancer abiraterone as a first treatment in place of standard hormone therapy improved survival by almost 40%.

Prostate cancer breakthroughs

Abiraterone is just one of the breakthroughs we’ve made to help double cancer survival in the UK over the past 50 years. Each one has touched thousands of lives, and trials like STAMPEDE show how every step forward makes more progress possible.

You can discover more about our growing legacy of innovations on our Breakthroughs hub. There’s more on the research that led to abiraterone in this Cancer Research UK milestones article from 2015.