The Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCF) has awarded $1.45 million in grants to three Dana-Farber investigators researching more powerful treatments for the disease.
The California-based foundation honored Mary-Ellen Taplin, MD, with the 2023 Movember, Todd Boehly, Shmuel Meitar, Richard Merkin, MD, Marcel Claure-PCF Challenge Award in support of a project to determine whether aggressive treatment with androgen-receptor signaling inhibitors (ARSI) before surgery can result in disease-free survival. At the same time, Taplin and eight collaborators will analyze tumor specimens to identify biomarkers that could show which patients are most likely to experience a recurrence of their cancer after treatment with surgery and radiation.
“We anticipate these studies will lead to a paradigm shift in the management of patients with high-risk localized prostate cancer,” said Taplin, chair of the Executive Committee for Clinical Research at Dana-Farber. “If we can identify the patients whose disease is likely to spread, we can treat them more intensively prior to metastasis while allowing those at low risk to avoid additional therapy.”
PCF honored radiation oncologist David Yang, MD, with the 2023 Chris & Katia Oberbeck-PCF Young Investigator Award for his work using artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning to uncover MRI and computational pathology biomarkers for localized prostate cancer.
“Our goal is to more accurately identify patients at elevated risk of having their disease recur who may benefit from more intensive treatments,” he said.
Postdoctoral fellow Varadha Balaji Venkadakrishnan, PhD, will apply the 2023 Kovler Family Foundation-PCF Young Investigator Award toward understanding the roles of two epigenetic regulators, EZH1 and EZH2, in neuroendocrine prostate cancer. “Because there are limited options for treating this lethal form of the disease, understanding its epigenetic underpinnings will result in novel treatment strategies,” he said.
“We are committed to the mission of ending death and suffering from prostate cancer,” said Howard Soule, PhD, executive vice president and chief science officer of PCF. “I look forward to the discoveries that these talented Dana-Farber scientists will make and to the innovative new therapies that may result.”
For more stories about the impact of philanthropy at Dana-Farber, please visit DanaFarberImpact.org.