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Are you a man with advanced or metastatic prostate cancer?  Unbeknownst to you, you may have already benefitted from treatments that are the results of the kinds of clinical trials that bring new and innovative treatments to market for patients.  Now, a new project believes every man should have the opportunity to help other patients, by contributing to a metastatic prostate cancer research study. The increased availability of genetic sequencing and internet-based communication has made it easy for any man to be a citizen scientist.

The Metastatic Prostate Cancer Project, led by prostate cancer physician and researcher Eli Van Allen, is a research initiative launched and funded by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and conducted in collaboration with Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and their advocacy partners, including The Prostate Cancer Foundation, to help men with advanced and metastatic prostate cancer. The purpose of the study is to collect clinical and genomic data from affected men across the country through a patient-driven study environment securely and confidentially.

So what’s involved for participants? The study team will request copies of pertinent medical records from the hospitals that provide care for each man’s prostate cancer. Collected data is confidential and protected, research discoveries and trends are shared with patients, and anonymized data is made widely available to the research community in order to accelerate the development of new treatment strategies.

This new research project will use the collected genetic sample of men with advanced or metastatic prostate cancer to create the most comprehensive database of men with this disease. The information will be shared with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the community of prostate cancer researchers for other genomic and molecular studies to help understand the disease and accelerate development of important new therapies for the men with advance disease, for whom speed of drug development is most critical. 

For more information and details on how to take part in the study, go to https://mpcproject.org/home.