The STAMPEDE prostate cancer trial wins NIHR Impact Prize
25 Mar 2025
The STAMPEDE clinical trial has won an NIHR Impact Prize for its outstanding impact on the lives of people with advanced prostate cancer.
The NIHR Impact Prizes celebrate researchers and teams who have maximised the impact of their research to drive improvements to health and care services, better wellbeing, or economic growth. The winners were revealed on 20th March at an awards ceremony in Birmingham.
As well as an Established Investigator award for STAMPEDE, former MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL PhD student Nurulamin Noor was also awarded an Early-career Researcher award for a biomarker-stratified trial in people with Crohn’s disease, which inspired, and formed part of, his PhD.
Nick James, Clinical Chief Investigator of the STAMPEDE trial based at the Institute of Cancer Research, accepted the award on behalf of the STAMPEDE team. He said:
“This Impact Award recognises the far-reaching impacts of the STAMPEDE results, which have influenced global treatment guidelines and changed clinical practice multiple times. This is thanks to the efforts of the STAMPEDE participants and research team, including the site staff based at more than 100 hospitals in the UK and Switzerland.”
Following decades of little improvement for advanced prostate cancer survival, STAMPEDE opened in 2005 and has since recruited almost 12,000 participants. The trial aimed to extend how long patients lived by giving additional treatments alongside standard-of-care hormone therapy early on, rather than waiting until hormone therapy had stopped working.
Using the innovative multi-arm multi-stage (MAMS) design, the STAMPEDE trial has tested 10 different treatments in less than 20 years – decades faster than would be possible using a series of traditional two-arm trials.
Max Parmar, Director of the MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL and UCL Institute of Clinical Trials and Methodology, said:
“STAMPEDE has changed the clinical trials landscape, paving the way for other trials to use adaptive platform designs. When we began working on STAMPEDE, this methodology was completely new. Now, 20 years later, the MAMS design has been used in more than 80 clinical trials across the world in multiple disease areas, from cancer to COVID-19 to neurodegenerative diseases.”
Thanks to advances driven by STAMPEDE, many people diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer today can expect to live much longer and healthier lives than in previous decades. The team estimate that 1 million life years have been gained globally (50,000 in the UK) as a result of the trial.
STAMPEDE finished recruiting new patients in March 2023 and follow-up of the final participants will finish later this year. But as one trial closes, a new trial opens. The STAMPEDE2 trial will take advantage of new technological advances to build on the impact of STAMPEDE and continue delivering better care for patients.
The STAMPEDE trial was funded by Cancer Research UK and the Medical Research Council, with further support from Prostate Cancer UK and pharmaceutical industry collaborators including Janssen, Astellas, Clovis Oncology, Novartis, Pfizer, and Sanofi-Aventis.
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