Prostate Cancer Treatment to Benefit from $4 Million Research Fund

Published on: 2012/07/25 - in Science & Tech

Canadian Prostate Cancer Biomarker Network – a recently formed national research group – is seeking better tools for treating prostate cancer, and a $4 million fund announced today will help develop more accurate tools for determining that treatment.

“The focus of this new Canadian Terry Fox Research Institute project is on identifying the best biomarker sets that tell doctors that a newly diagnosed prostate cancer needs a treatment intervention such as surgery or radiation,” said Jeremy Squire (pictured), a Queen’s University researcher with Pathology and Molecular Medicine who is also a physician at Kingston General Hospital.

The researchers will work towards identifying new methods to determine what forms of prostate cancer require immediate treatment and which do not. They will also study ways to better predict which patients – after having surgery or receiving radiation therapy – are at risk of their cancer progressing.

“Some of the biological indicators may suggest new types of treatment approaches. Other biological indicators may show the new cancer is less likely to be aggressive, and the patient can be managed without intervention by an observational method called active surveillance. The overall program is developing decision tools for doctors to help them plan a more personalized approach to treating this disease.”

“We are extremely pleased to create this important biomarker research network and to provide $4 million to address an important clinical question that both doctors who treat the disease and men who are diagnosed with it must consider,” said Darrell Fox, senior advisor for the Terry Fox Research Institute (TFRI).

This research is being funded by the Canadian Terry Fox Research Institute and the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer.

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Photo: Queen’s University News Centre