Karmanos is pleased to announce that it has received a Movember – Prostate Cancer Foundation PCF Challenge Award totaling $1 million. PCF Challenge Awards are granted to teams at some of the world’s leading cancer research institutions to support cross-disciplinary pioneering research toward the goal of finding cures for prostate cancer. The funds were raised from the 2020 Movember U.S. Campaign and from the 2020 Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride.
Elisabeth Heath, M.D., FACP, leader of the Genitourinary Multidisciplinary Team at Karmanos Cancer Institute, Associate Center Director for Translational Science, and Hartmann Endowed Chair for Prostate Cancer Research will serve as a principal investigator for the funded project.
Dr. Heath and her team received the award for the project titled MET-PAAM: Elucidating the Molecular Mechanisms of Tumor Progression in Metastatic Prostate Cancer among Men of African Ancestry. Through this project, the research team will map the landscape of genomic alterations in African American prostate cancers, which will enable the development of new precision medicine approaches. This is critical because African American patients experience significant disparities in prostate cancer diagnosis and outcomes compared with Caucasian patients. The team will also create a digital health tool that can increase ethnic and racial diversity in prostate cancer clinical trials and develop a training program to increase the numbers of underrepresented minorities in the field of computational prostate cancer disparities research.
Principal Investigators: Franklin Huang, M.D., Ph.D. (University of California, San Francisco; San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center), Elisabeth Heath, M.D. (Karmanos Cancer Institute; Wayne State University), Clayton Yates, Ph.D. (Tuskegee University).
Co-Investigators: Hala Borno, M.D. (University of California San Francisco), Matthew Cooperberg, M.D., MPH (San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center; University of California, San Francisco), Nancy Greenland, M.D., Ph.D. (San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center; University of California, San Francisco), Felix Feng, M.D. (University of California, San Francisco), Thomas Hope, M.D. (San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center; University of California, San Francisco).
For more detailed project descriptions, click here.