Proposal for the renewal of funds for the NCRI s South of England Prostate Cancer Collaborative

See Section 9 of the report

Our Prostate Cancer Collaborative (PCC) is dedicated to key areas of translational research that will continue, over the next 5 years, to impact on prostate cancer patients lives. Namely the PCC aims: to develop improved markers for the clinical management of prostate cancer; to develop better strategies for managing patients will localised disease; to develop better drugs and treating patients with hormone refractory prostate cancer; and to improve our understanding of the genetics and aetiology of prostate cancer. We believe that in the long term the strategy outlined in these proposals will allow the development of several areas of research where the PCC will be internationally competitive and in some cases occupy unique niches. By the end of the second 5 year NCRI award we expect to maintain our strong portfolios in Cancer Genetics and Radiotherapy but additionally have fully developed programmes in Molecular Pathology (clinical marker identification), Developmental Biology and Drug Development linked to Phase I/II clinical trials. We believe that by this time will also have several internationally unique programmes including (i) Active Surveillance Trials linked both to clinical marker studies and to tertiary chemoprevention trials, (ii) marker studies linked to large epidemiological studies (EPIC-PROSTATE), and (iii) marker analyses linked to the Translatlantic Prostate Association (TAPA) study. Several of these initiatives (eg Active Surveillance , Genetics, Radiotherapy, Drug Development) are anticipated to have significant impacts on the management of prostate cancer patients both nationally and internationally.