The Prostate Cancer Foundation announced it is providing more than $12 million in funding through its 2025 Challenge Awards to support 12 multi-institutional, cross-disciplinary research teams focused on some of the most urgent challenges in prostate cancer.
The funding will support projects ranging from artificial intelligence-powered tools to improve pathology diagnosis and risk prediction to novel immunotherapies to overcome treatment resistance. Additional efforts include combining radiation therapy with targeted drugs for patients with high-risk gene mutations linked to rapid cancer spread, as well as identifying molecular vulnerabilities and new drug targets for the most aggressive, treatment-resistant forms of the disease.
Since launching the Challenge Awards program in 2008, the foundation has invested nearly $290 million in research initiatives that have helped extend and improve the lives of tens of thousands of patients. Each award typically provides $1 million over two to three years and requires a minimum of three team members, including at least one early-career investigator. The 2025 class was selected from 106 applicant teams after a rigorous peer-review process that evaluated both scientific merit and potential patient impact.
Past Challenge Awards have helped lay the groundwork for new treatment classes, including PARP inhibitors and PSMA-targeted radioligand therapies, and have supported advances in imaging techniques that enable more precise radiation targeting of aggressive tumors while sparing healthy tissue. Other funded teams have explored combination therapies pairing PSMA radiation with targeted drugs or new forms of immunotherapy to address drug-resistant prostate cancer.
Founded in 1993 by Mike Milken, the foundation has raised more than $1 billion to fund over 2,615 research projects across 312 leading cancer centers in 29 countries. The organization says it remains committed to ending death and suffering from prostate cancer by accelerating the development of life-saving diagnostic tools and treatments.
KEY QUOTES:
“The Prostate Cancer Foundation’s Challenge Awards program drives critical breakthroughs that are saving and extending the lives of patients with prostate cancer. The Challenge Awards program is especially vital now, when prostate cancer cases are rising 4.8% year over year and a high percentage of patients have advanced or high-risk disease. We thank our visionary donors for believing in the power of scientific innovation to improve and extend these patients’ lives, and for trusting the Prostate Cancer Foundation to steward each gift for maximum impact.”
Gina Carithers, President and CEO, Prostate Cancer Foundation
“The Challenge Awards program enables researchers to work across disciplines and institutions in ways that traditional funding mechanisms do not support. By streamlining resources, the Prostate Cancer Foundation is driving high-risk, high-reward projects in cutting-edge fields such as genomics, immunology, AI, pathology, and drug development. This collaborative model accelerates the translation of laboratory discoveries into new diagnostic tools and treatment options that can significantly benefit patients and their families.”
Andrea K. Miyahira, PhD, Vice President of Global Research and Innovation, Prostate Cancer Foundation
