Phillip Koo:

So we're going to move on to the second study, called the CAPTAIN study. So this really talks about focal therapy, which is something many of us are familiar with, but we don't know too much about.

Fascinating trial, turn it over to you, Zach.

Zachary Klaassen:

Yeah, really interesting trial. Again, presented at EAU a couple weeks ago, and so this was led by, actually, one of my mentors, Lori Klotz, who's in, University of Toronto. He was, one of the PIs on this study, and certainly a multi-center study. And so this is basically the first head-to-head in a really well-designed trial of a focal therapy to one of the gold standards, which is radical prostatectomy. So, this was intermediate risk patients randomized to TULSA, which is basically a… it's a form of ultrasound treatment directed to the prostate gland.

Typically not treating the whole prostate, but part of the prostate, versus the gold standard of prostatectomy. And so they have many endpoints here. Safety endpoint is essentially whether this is safe, which is important, and then oncological endpoints, as you can see here, will be followed for 3 up to 10 years.

And so we'll really get a lot of information. This was just the first presentation of CAPTAIN, so they focused on the safety, and this primary composite endpoint was, pad-free survival, so leakage of urine.

As well as, as well as erectile function. So, we see here that, not surprisingly, if you're treating part of the prostate, not taking all of it out, 50% primary composite endpoint versus 24% in the prostatectomy group. So this wasn't a surprising finding, for, for us.

And then we look also at the quality of life in the bottom left. Quality of life was higher with the TULSA procedure, so usually this is an outpatient procedure versus maybe one night in the hospital. Quicker time back to work, less pain, less discomfort. So that was… you can see here, that almost gets back up to baseline within several days of treatment.

And then, early results for continents and erections in the bottom right, and we see that with pad-free continence, over 75% for TULSA versus just under 50% for prostatectomy. And then erectile function, about 55% versus just under 50%. And a lot of this has to do with what kind of function the patients come into the trial with. 

Whether they're already leaking, whether they already have some sexual dysfunction. So, very encouraging early, early results from this. I think all of us are not surprised by these results, but we're looking forward to seeing some of these oncological endpoints.

We don't want to miss a window for a cure in… from a cancer standpoint, but certainly, you know, we know that these side effects of erectile dysfunction and incontinence can be very debilitating, so we'll be looking forward to seeing more information from this trial over the next several years.