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If you aren’t familiar with the Metastatic Prostate Cancer Project (MPCproject), it is a nationwide genomic research study for men with advanced or metastatic prostate cancer. For those who have heard of the MPCproject, you are probably already familiar with their great work. Regardless of your familiarity with the MPCproject, we want to give you an update on their work to keep you informed.

The goal of the MPCproject is to create the most comprehensive database that will be shared with the entire prostate cancer research community to accelerate discoveries. You can think of it as crowd-sourcing, except instead of money or clothing, patients are donating medical data to prostate cancer research. Databases are crucial to progress in medical research, and very often the information that is collected is hoarded by the institution that collects it, but the MPCproject makes its data widely available to prostate cancer researchers. Why is this so important? The more medical data researchers have access to, the faster they will be able to make meaningful progress in prostate cancer treatment. A similar project for people with metastatic breast cancer is already underway and has collected data from thousands of patients. As an advocacy partner with the MPCproject, PCF wants to help bring just as much useful data to researchers working to cure metastatic prostate cancer.

So far over 1000 patients have registered with MPCproject and as a result hundreds of saliva kits, blood kits, tissue samples, and medical records have been donated all in the name of improving the MPCproject’s database and ultimately helping to accelerate life-saving research. Much more data– including clinical, patient-reported, and genomic sequencing data – from many more patients and samples, will be added in the near future.

The MPCproject is currently running a study to look at what can be learned from multiple blood samples from individual patients across time. By studying changes in tumor DNA in the blood over time, researchers hope to learn how treatment for prostate cancer may affect the tumor genome.

Anonymously donating samples is a great way to help us in our goal of eliminating prostate cancer. Participants can choose what material they are comfortable sharing so there is no pressure to send everything. If you are interested, or know anyone who may be interested, please visit the MPCproject website.