Donor Funding: $597,196
Cancer Type: Prostate
Cancer Stage: Treatment
Funded in: 2020, 2021
Associate Professor Luke Selth
Flinders University
More than 350,000 men die from prostate cancer each year worldwide.
In Australia, it caused the death of 3,452 Australian men in 2017, and takes more healthy years of life than any cancer except lung. The lethal phase of this disease is referred to as castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC), which occurs after failure of hormonal therapies (“androgen deprivation therapies”). CRPC is currently treated with new and more potent androgen deprivation therapies and also chemotherapy, but the survival benefits associated with these treatments are in the order of months and all can cause severe side-effects in patients.
In short, better treatments for CRPC are urgently required, a reality strongly endorsed by our team’s consumer advocates, all of whom are prostate cancer survivors.
My vision over the next 3-5 years is to use the latest technological advancements in cancer research to better understand how lethal prostate cancers grow, and then use this information to discover new therapeutic strategies. My longer-term goal is to develop new drugs that will have a major impact on reducing death caused by prostate cancer.