At PCF, we don’t just want men to live, and live longer… we want men to lead a full life. That means that life after cancer is someday free of debilitating side effects. And that means that we work hard to keep your whole family safe from cancer.
PCF has been a relentless advocate for:
Increasing awareness for men to get screened at the right time for your risk factors to catch disease early.
Promoting contemporary recommendations for Active Surveillance when evaluating treatment options.
Developing alternatives to hormone therapy based on the genes that run in your family
Developing alternatives to chemotherapy such as targeted radiopharmaceuticals, precision T-cell immunotherapy, and PARP inhibitors.
Educating patients and doctors to rely on your doctor’s “Precision Prescription Pad,” as opposed to immediately jumping to cookie-cutter therapies.
The Prostate Cancer Foundation, under the leadership of venture philanthropist Mike Milken, was one of the first scientific authorities to invest in the power of lifestyle changes to affect our ability to fight off, live with, and transcend cancer.
If you’re like a lot of people, you may have traditionally thought of things like nutrition and exercise as “soft sciences,” plagued by lore and pop science. In fact, early investment in lifestyle factors research is finally starting to pay off. PCF investigators have made some key discoveries.
For many years, we thought of cancer exclusively as an organ site disease – you had breast cancer or prostate cancer or lung cancer. Thanks in part to research funded by the Prostate Cancer Foundation, we are now beginning to understand that things like inherited genes or race may play a big role in cancer development, particularly the development of advanced cancers that are the hardest to treat.
BRCA2, BRCA1, ATM and PALB2 are 4 of the many genes that PCF-funded researchers helped identify. If your family carries mutations in one of these genes, your risk for developing four types of cancer may be up to 5-10 fold higher or more.
Our mission is shifting from saving men’s lives to keeping your whole family safe.
It turns out that these genes don’t just pass from father to son. For example, the BRCA1 gene, most famously responsible for a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer, is also responsible for one of the most aggressive forms of prostate cancer. PCF is still doing what we’ve been doing for 25 years now: saving men’s lives. But a new era in diagnosis and treatment is on the horizon, and PCF is slowly shifting its mission to keeping your whole family safe. If you think your family might be at risk, consider consulting a genetic counselor or ask your doctor about cascade genetic testing.
African American men are 74% more likely to develop prostate cancer, and PCF is actively involved in multiple research projects focusing on these health disparity issues.
