The Work We Fund

The Prostate Cancer Foundation has been a major catalyst for many of the scientific advances in prostate cancer research since 1993.

PCF has awarded more than 2,250 projects that offer hope for improving outcomes in patients with prostate cancer. These high-impact projects include clinical research to evaluate new drugs, novel treatment strategies for prostate cancer and basic scientific research to better understand the biology of prostate cancer.

Young Investigator Awards

The Young Investigator Awards offer career and project support for young (generally 35 and younger) proven investigators in postdoctoral fellowships or who have recently achieved junior faculty positions and are committing their lives to the field of prostate cancer.

Challenge Awards

These awards provide $300,000 to $1.5 million annually for three years, supporting teams of at least three experienced investigators from one or multiple institutions to address key challenges in prostate cancer research.

TACTICAL Awards

PCF TACTICAL (Therapy ACceleration To Intercept CAncer Lethality) Awards provide up to $10 million over three years to support large-scale research projects led by qualified teams of academic scientists that specifically address the development of 21st Century therapies for lethal forms of prostate cancer.

Prostate Cancer
Dream Teams

In 2012, PCF spent $20 million and funded two “Dream Teams”–groups of top scientists from institutions in the U.S., the UK, and Canada–whose research findings transformed our knowledge of metastatic prostate cancer and ushered in the era of precision medicine in treating prostate cancer.

Creativity & Other Awards

These two-year awards for $300,000 support exceptionally novel projects with great potential to produce breakthroughs for detecting and treating prostate cancer. They are complementary and integrated with other PCF award programs.

PCF-VA Awards

Every PCF Award that has a VA affiliation is given the VALOR designation for “VA Leverage of Research (VALOR) and reflects the valor inherent in our courageous Veterans battling prostate cancer and brave doctor and researchers serving our nation’s heroes.

“In 1991, if you were diagnosed with metastatic castrate resistant prostate cancer, the median or average survival was six months, that remained true until PCF came along.”

Kenneth Pienta, M.D.
Professor of Urology and Oncology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine