Everyman - The home of prostate and testicular cancer research- Areas of research support

Areas of research support

Here are some of the current areas of prostate and testicular cancer research which your money will help to support:

To develop new drugs to treat prostate cancer and improve patient survival for this disease.
To further refine intensity modulated radiotherapy, which delivers the treatment more precisely to prostate cancer cells, improving cure rates by allowing higher doses to be used with no increase in side-effects.
To establish whether combining surgery, radiotherapy and hormone treatment extends the life of men with aggressive prostate cancer and, if so, for this to become standard treatment in the UK.
To find a large proportion of the genes that make men more susceptible to prostate cancer, and develop a programme of targeted screening for high-risk men in order to diagnose the disease at an early stage.
To develop a more accurate screening test for prostate cancer, for example measuring circulating tumour cells in combination with the existing PSA test.
To further establish the benefits of active surveillance in treating men with prostate cancer and avoid unnecessary treatment for men without aggressive disease.
To translate the genetic abnormalities identified for prostate cancer into a test that can be used in the clinic. This would differentiate between whether the disease is aggressive and requires treatment or slow growing, requiring monitoring only.

To look at whether diet and environmental factors may be involved in the development of prostate cancer and investigating the capacity of the prostate gland to activate and break down environmental carcinogens that may be involved.
To find a large proportion of the genes that make men more susceptible to testicular cancer. This should provide our scientists with a greater understanding of the biology of the disease.
For testicular cancer our scientists are developing biomarkers to predict whether a patient is likely to relapse through microscopic and currently undetectable spread of a tumour. This will allow our scientists to optimise treatment, avoiding the potentially detrimental effects of over-treating some patients and providing curative treatment for those who need it.

We still need to raise more awareness of testicular and prostate cancer. We will continue to look at new and innovative ways to raise more awareness of prostate and testicular cancer.