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• Key Achievements

Key Achievements

Orchid has made significant advances in cancer research and aims to discover the most effective treatments with the least side effects for men with male specific cancers. Examples of our achievements to date include:

• The setting up of the Orchid Male Genitourinary Cancer Clinical Trials Unit which acted as the prototype for Barts' Experimental Cancer Medical Centre.
• The launch of the Orchid Tissue Bank. This is an internationally renowned tissue bank for cancer research analysis. The Orchid Tissue Bank has the largest collection of penile cancers in a tissue array in Europe, probably the largest testicular tissue bank in the world, and is custodian of the largest series of untreated prostate cancers.
• The introduction of the single shot carboplatin regime following surgery instead of the more toxic radiotherapy as the standard treatment for early stage testicular tumours.
• The discovery of reduced incidence of second tumours combined with earlier diagnosis, leading to our campaign to remove just the tumour (lumpectomy), rather than the whole testicle (orchidectomy) for a better quality of life for patients including the possibility of 'natural' fatherhood.
• New highly successful treatments for men with aggressive testicular cancers.
• A new treatment for prostate cancer involving the use of chemotherapy in hormone resistant patients, enabling intermittent hormone therapy to be re-introduced.
• The discovery of genetic mechanisms and genes that cause the chemo-resistance of testicular tumours.
• The identification of a novel genetic change, t(4;6), in prostate cancer.
• The identification of new factors such as the gene Ki-67 as markers of prostate cancer aggressiveness.
• The discovery that Chinese and Western prostate cancers pose different genomic changes.
• The discovery that the risk of testis cancer is increased in people with HIV.
• The finding that high risk HPV 16 infection predominates in pre-malignant and malignant penile lesions, upregulates the protein Rb and it is likely to be a risk factor in the development of a significant proportion of penile cancers.