A Natural Adjunct to Cancer Treatments?

Interviewer: Doctor, could you talk about Pomi-T, what is that? Just describe that for us.

Dr. Thomas: Well, Pomi-T actually is derived from a placebo controlled randomized trial, which we performed in the U.K., in Cambridge and Bedford. And the name of the trial was nicknamed Pomi-T. But then from that, a supplement was developed which then had the same name, called Pomi-T which contains four polyphenol-rich foods; pomegranate, green tea, turmeric and broccoli, which have basically been concentrated, freeze-dried and put into a pill as sort of a convenient way to boost your daily polyphenols. So that's now become known as Pomi-T.

Interviewer: And what is it used for? What do you recommend that for?

Dr. Thomas: I'm a consultant oncologist and I research into nutritional lifestyle strategies and we originally developed this with an institution in the U.K. called the NCRI, or the National Cancer Research Institute. We developed a trial to see whether we can boost someone's polyphenols on a daily basis, it would reduce the risk of prostate cancer progression in men, and who are on a program called Active Surveillance where they don't have any other treatments. They're just being watched for a little while. Or men who have had prostate cancer treated and their PSA levels have started to increase to show that the disease is relapsing.

So it was specifically evaluated in those two groups of men, to see if you can prolong the time which is needed before they go on to have a, say, prostatectomy, hormone therapies. And so, if we were to go by the trial itself, it was that group of men who was seen to have a significant benefit. But, of course, the background development of Pomi-T was to look for anti-cancer properties generally. That was just the first trial we started. And from the trial, of course, this was run through the U.K. government so it was very strictly conducted and controlled. We had to measure lots of parameters of benefit including a number of things like joint pains, which came out as also being positive. Now, of course that was only a secondary end point so we can't really report that in the medical journals but we are now going to have other trials looking at a number of things such as, you know, whether it helps joint pains. We're going to look at other types of conditions, men with prostate cancer on other treatments such as men who have already started hormone therapy but the hormone therapy is starting to lose control to see if we can get more out of it.

So, you know, I've gone a long way around to answer your question...yes, specifically for the trial it was those two groups of men but we are hoping there'll be a whole new group of people who may see benefits from these treatments.