The Prostate Cancer Foundation and Robert F. Smith, founder, chairman and CEO of Vista Equity Partners, plan to collaborate on research to reduce deaths from prostate cancer.
“As African American men are at an increased risk for being diagnosed or dying from prostate cancer, understanding their risk profile and applying this knowledge earlier with strategic detection, care, and decisions about cancer risk management is of utmost importance to address health inequity in the U.S.,” Smith said in a statement. “This is why I made a personal commitment to help accelerate research, encourage African American men to participate in the study and subsequent testing, and develop new detection strategies that have the power to transform how we diagnose and treat this disease and help save lives.”
The research Smith is supporting will lead to the development of the Smith Polygenic Risk Test for Prostate Cancer, a non-invasive, early detection test that will identify a man’s lifetime prostate cancer risk using a combination of more than 250 genetic variants obtained from a single sample of saliva or blood. The Smith Test is expected to cost less than $90 USD and will be made available in PCF’s dedicated Veterans Affairs network of Centers of Excellence, including the Robert Frederick Smith Center of Precision Oncology Excellence at the VA Chicago.
The test is part of a larger PCF research initiative to improve the understanding of genetic risk in African American men and transform early detection and imaging strategies, risk management, and clinical-decision making by men at highest lifetime risk of prostate cancer. The research, led by Chris Haiman, a genetic epidemiologist at the University of Southern California, and international colleagues, is aimed at accelerating the reduction of prostate cancer disparities for African American men by 2030.
Most genomic studies of prostate cancer have focused on men of European ancestry, and there is a need for additional resources to develop and optimize a polygenic risk score in those disproportionately affected. The new Smith-PCF initiative plans to increase the representation of African American men in the study and expand research to allow Haiman to quadruple the size of his study cohort, a step to providing access to the Smith Polygenic Risk Test as soon as possible.
African American men are 76% more likely to develop prostate cancer than Caucasian men, and are more than twice as likely to die from the disease compared to men of other ethnicities.
