NIH and Prostate Cancer Foundation to Study Prostate Cancer in African American Men
Posted: Tuesday, August 7, 2018
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Prostate Cancer Foundation have launched a study to investigate the biologic and nonbiologic factors associated with aggressive prostate cancer in African American men. The $26.5 million RESPOND study, titled “Research on Prostate Cancer in Men of African Ancestry: Defining the Roles of Genetics, Tumor Markers, and Social Stress,” will investigate the environmental and genetic factors related to the aggressiveness of prostate cancer in African American men to better understand why they disproportionally experience aggressive disease compared with men of other racial and ethnic groups.
The investigators aim to enroll 10,000 African American men with prostate cancer into the RESPOND study. The participants will be identified primarily via the NCI’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Program of Cancer Registries. In addition, this study builds on years of research collaboration involving investigators who are part of the African Ancestry Prostate Cancer consortium.
Topics under study include the possible associations between aggressive disease and exposures to environmental stressors such as discrimination, early-life adversity, and segregation. The investigators will also study DNA and tumor samples to identify gene variants associated with aggressive prostate cancer. Once researchers have identified such genetic changes, they will explore how the social environment interacts with those genetic changes.
“We celebrate our partnership and applaud NIH for spearheading this study, which we believe will help pave the way for groundbreaking discoveries that will improve health equity for African American men and their families,” said Jonathan W. Simons, MD, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Prostate Cancer Foundation, in an NCI press release.
