The National Cancer Institute, a branch of the National Institutes of Health, has awarded $12.7 million to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center to lead a multi-center, five-year investigation into the genetic mechanisms of prostate-cancer progression.

Understanding how and why prostate cancer can turn deadly is key to developing therapies that may effectively treat men with recurrent or advanced prostate cancer, for which there is no cure.

Known as the Pacific Northwest Prostate Cancer Research SPORE [1] (short for Specialized Program of Research Excellence), the initiative will involve more than 50 investigators in Seattle and Vancouver, B.C.