Six new Movember Foundation - PCF Challenge Awards have been funded to advance precision medicine and novel treatments for lethal prostate cancer.

The Movember Foundation is proud to announce our donation of nearly $7 million to the Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCF), our valued men’s health partner since 2007. These funds were raised by our Movember community during the 2014 Movember US campaign and will support six new Movember Foundation-PCF Challenge Awards for investigations in metastatic, lethal prostate cancer.

The Movember Foundation-PCF Challenge Awards are multi-year team science projects that focus specifically on permanent solutions for lasting remissions in advanced prostate cancer patients. To date, the Movember Foundation has contributed approximately $39 million to the PCF funding 28 projects with global impact that will help PCF further its aim to provide men in urgent need with new prostate cancer treatments and cures.

Click here to read in-depth about the 2015 Movember Foundation – PCF Challenge Awards 

“Our focus on metastatic prostate cancer fills a critical gap in our understanding of the disease,” said Jonathan W. Simons, president and chief executive officer, PCF. “While our research efforts have helped to reduce the prostate cancer death rate by more than 50%, this advanced form of the disease remains the leading cause of prostate cancer deaths in the United States. Our vital partnership with the Movember Foundation brings us closer to conquering this disease.”

"The Movember Foundation is committed to raising awareness and funding breakthrough prostate cancer research with our partners at PCF,” said Mark Hedstrom, US Country Director for the Movember Foundation. “We are extremely pleased to be funding six new Challenge Awards and couldn’t do it without our incredible Movember community, who is changing the face of men’s health."

One million dollars was awarded to a team led by Phuoc Tran, MD, PhD (Johns Hopkins University) for their work on oligometastatic prostate cancer. This disease state, in which only a few detectable metastatic lesions have developed in a treatment-naïve patient, may still represent a curable form of advanced prostate cancer if effective treatments can be developed. Dr. Tran and team are studying the effects of using stereotactic ablative radiation (SABR) with or without immunotherapy and developing non-invasive methods of disease monitoring. If successful, this project will lead to a new treatment regimen that extends the lives of oligometastatic prostate cancer patients.

One million dollars was also awarded to Peter Nelson, MD (University of Washington) and team for a study of metastatic prostate cancer genomics that will advance precision medicine for the disease. Successful treatment of prostate cancer requires the identification of genomic alterations that confer sensitivity patient to specific treatments. Dr. Nelson and team are identifying and characterizing DNA-damage repair gene alterations that occur in 20-30% of prostate tumors. If successful, this study will result in the development of biomarker tests that identify patients who should be treated with PARP inhibitors or platinum chemotherapy, and will enable population-based screening to identify individuals at increased risk for prostate cancer.

The following 2015 proposals also received funding:
• Targeting the MLL Complex for the Development of New Therapeutics for CRPC, led by Shaomeng Wang, PhD of the University of Michigan
• Integrative Genomics of Prostate Cancer Progression, led by Mark Rubin, MD of Weill Cornell Medical College
• CARAVAN: Checkpoint-Radiation-Vaccine Neoadjuvant Trial for Metastatic Prostate Cancer, led by Adam Dicker, MD, PhD of Thomas Jefferson University
• Targeting Aberrant AR-FL and AR-V Expression and Activity to Overcome Therapy Resistance in Metastatic Castration-Resistant Prostate Cancer, led by Haojie Huang, PhD of the Mayo Clinic 

Thanks to the Movember community’s generous financial support we are working with world-class partners like the PCF towards a world where men live happier, healthier, longer lives. 

Read more about the 1,000 programs the Movember Foundation has funded around the globe.