01 Jun UW Carbone Cancer Center receives SPORE designation, federal grant to support prostate cancer research

University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center will be designated as a Specialized Program of Research Excellence, or SPORE, by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) for research initiatives to advance new prostate cancer treatments.

By Sara Benzel, UW SMPH

This highly competitive designation comes with more than $11 million in federal funding to support new and existing research efforts, according to Dr. David Jarrard, surgical oncologist and deputy director, UW Carbone, and professor of urology, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

“It’s really an exciting time for prostate cancer research here,” he said. “This will provide an opportunity to take observations from the laboratories and bring them to our patients as new therapeutics.”

Moving research discoveries from the laboratory bench to clinical treatments has been the precise intention of SPORE grants since the program began in 1992, according to NCI. SPORE grants are designed to enable a rapid and efficient evolution of scientific findings into clinical settings. They also support research to determine the causes of cancer in individuals and populations.

This SPORE grant will focus on methods that could improve treatments for patients with more advanced-stage prostate cancer, an area of growing need in recent years, according to Dr. Douglas McNeel, professor of medicine, UW School of Medicine and Public Health, and medical oncologist and director of solid tumor immunology research at UW Carbone.

“We want to improve outcomes for patients,” he said. “To do that we need to catch it early and understand how to treat prostate cancer on the individual level and prevent it from recurring.”

The three main areas the SPORE grant will focus on are the immediate environment surrounding a prostate tumor which is referred to as the tumor microenvironment, the diversity of prostate cancer and how different cancer types respond to treatment within an individual patient, and cancer vaccines as treatments for prostate cancer. Read more …