Posted on behalf of Heidi Ledford

It’s amazing what a good personal story can do to crank up the impact of medical reporting. Today held a couple of such stories amidst the flurry of articles about a potential treatment for prostate cancer.

Yesterday, I’d had a quick look at the Journal of Clinical Oncology paper that spurred the flurry. The first thing I saw was this: “n=21”. Twenty-one subjects is a reasonable size for a phase I trial, but I’ve developed a reluctance to write about a miracle cancer cure until the numbers get a bit higher. Today, however, there were several articles that made n=21 sound much more meaningful. The BBC, the Times, and the Daily Mail all started off their coverage with moving personal accounts of dramatic results in men who’d been told to prepare themselves for death.

The drug, called abiraterone acetate, works by inhibiting a protein called cytochrome P 17 (CYP17) that is involved in making male sex hormones called androgens. The hope is that the drug will work in men whose cancers don’t respond to castration. Castration eliminates the production of testosterone in the gonads, but androgens produced elsewhere may continue to stimulate the cancer. Most deaths from prostate cancer occur due to these castration-resistant forms. (More general info on prostate cancer here.)

Many of the articles that I saw noted the small sample size, though a few didn’t (Reuters). Also, to my knowledge, the drug’s efficacy hasn’t been directly compared with chemotherapy. But the authors say that they’ve already completed phase II trials and a 1200 person study is ongoing (Sky News), so we may not have too much longer to wait to get a clearer answer.