Groundbreaking Birmingham University trial to help cancer patients manage arthritis

Professor Benjamin Fisher from Birmingham University is developing a new trial for cancer treatments, hoping to ease the painful side effects that typically incur after traditional treatments, such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

Birmingham University is leading the new REACT trial, which will be delivered through the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Birmingham Biomedical Research Centre

via Unsplash

The treatment comes in response to immunotherapy, an effective treatment for cancer is immunotherapy. Whilst immunotherapy is effective in treating cancer, it can cause inflammatory side effects. This is as the treatment involves patients taking immune checkpoint inhibitor drugs that prevent a person’s immune system from turning off.

Although this counteracts the cancer as cancer works by attempting to stop a person’s immune system from working by ‘switching it off’ (in very simple terms). The drugs aim to turn the patient’s immune system back on.

However, it can cause inflammatory side effects by going too far in the other direction. In some cases the immune checkpoint inhibitors work too well and push the immune system into overdrive.

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This leads to the immune system attacking the healthy parts of a person’s body. This manifests in many different ways one of them being arthritis. This can affect up to 5 percent of cancer patients and can hugely impact their quality of life. This is what the REACT trial is aiming to tackle.

via Unsplash

The aim of this trial is to look into the effectiveness of a drug called anti-TNF, in treating cancer patients with arthritis not only in a way that is more effective than the traditional treatment of steroid tablets, but also in a way that interferes less with the cancer treatment itself.

Rebecca Smith from Solihull has already partaken in the REACT trial and speaks of how partaking in this trial means that her “quality of life is back to what it was before”.

The REACT trial is set to run up until August 2028 and in that time they hope to have 70 participants to help them view the safety and effectiveness of the treatment strategies.

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