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Contemporary Research

Through our rigorous review process, PCF selects and funds research projects that have the highest potential to change the game for patients with prostate cancer: to lead to greater understanding of prostate cancer biology, to inform prognosis and optimize treatment planning, or to translate into a new medicine.

Projects initiated during PCF’s second and third decades continue to return benefits for patients today.

Understanding Gene Changes Leads to New Therapies

In 2012, as we entered our third decade, PCF convened and funded two “Dream Teams:” a revolutionary approach to funding large-scale, multi-institution projects seeking to answer fundamentally important questions in prostate cancer. Not only did these teams succeed in their initial efforts, but investigators today continue to build on their findings.

Among the results:

  • A genetic map of advanced prostate cancer showing “actionable” tumor mutations, in pathways that can be targeted by available standard or experimental therapies, in more than 90 percent of patients in the study.
  • The same types of mutations that can cause breast and ovarian cancer in women (such as in the genes BRCA1 and BRCA2) can cause lethal prostate cancer in men. 
  • Because of these findings and the results of other work funded in part by PCF, new precision drugs called PARP inhibitors were developed for advanced prostate cancer. The first of these were FDA approved in 2020. 

Read more about the Dream Teams.

“See it, treat it” – Targeting Radiation to Prostate Cancer Cells

PCF first funded research on PSMA (prostate-specific membrane antigen), a protein found on the surface of prostate cancer cells, in 1994. PSMA was first used as a target for imaging, to see small amounts of prostate cancer metastases. Later, PCF funded clinical trials taking the next step: to attack the cancer by delivering tumor-killing radiation to prostate cancer cells with PSMA on their surface, anywhere in the body. In March 2022, the FDA approved the first-in-class PSMA-targeted radioligand therapy called 177lutetium-PSMA-617 (Pluvicto®). Multiple trials led by PCF-funded investigators are now testing this treatment and other PSMA-targeted radioligand therapies in different prostate cancer disease states. Still other PCF-funded projects are leveraging this concept to explore other target molecules, as well as to combine radioligand therapy with other treatments such as immunotherapy.

Learn more about PSMA-targeted radioligand therapy.