Prostate Cancer Foundation Awards $12 Million in 2025 Challenge Grants

LOS ANGELES, Calif. – March 3, 2026 – The Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCF) today announced the recipients of its 2025 Challenge Awards, providing over $12 million in funding to 12 multi-institutional, cross-disciplinary research teams. These teams are focused on addressing critical challenges in prostate cancer diagnosis and treatment.

Advancing Prostate Cancer Research

Since the program’s launch in 2008, the PCF’s Challenge Awards program has invested nearly $290 million in cutting-edge research projects. This investment has driven innovations that have improved the lives of tens of thousands of patients. The 2025 awards will support research into areas such as artificial intelligence (AI) for improved diagnosis, novel immunotherapies to overcome treatment resistance, and fresh therapeutic strategies combining radiation therapy with targeted drugs for patients with high-risk genetic mutations.

Focus Areas of the 2025 Challenge Awards

The funded research projects are concentrating on:

• AI-Powered Diagnosis and Prognostication: Developing artificial intelligence tools to enhance the accuracy and speed of pathology diagnosis and predict disease progression.
• Overcoming Treatment Resistance: Investigating novel immunotherapies to combat prostate cancer’s ability to become resistant to existing treatments.
• Targeted Therapies: Exploring new therapeutic strategies, including combining radiation therapy with targeted drugs, for patients with aggressive gene changes that accelerate cancer spread.
• Identifying New Drug Targets: Discovering molecular vulnerabilities and new drug targets for the most aggressive and treatment-resistant forms of prostate cancer.

Rising Incidence and the Necessitate for Innovation

“The Prostate Cancer Foundation’s Challenge Awards program drives critical breakthroughs that are saving and extending the lives of patients with prostate cancer,” said Gina Carithers, President and CEO of the Prostate Cancer Foundation. She emphasized the program’s importance given the 4.8% year-over-year increase in prostate cancer cases and the growing number of patients with advanced or high-risk disease.

Collaborative Research Model

The Challenge Awards program fosters collaboration between researchers across disciplines and institutions. Each award typically provides $1 million over 2-3 years and requires a team of at least three investigators, including one early-career researcher. The program prioritizes high-risk, high-reward projects in fields like genomics, immunology, AI, pathology, and drug development.

Past Successes

Previous Challenge Awards have contributed to the development of significant advancements in prostate cancer treatment, including PARP inhibitors and PSMA-targeted radioligand therapy. These therapies have demonstrably improved the quality of life and extended the lives of patients with advanced prostate cancer. Other past projects have focused on using advanced imaging to precisely target tumors with radiation, minimizing damage to healthy tissue.

About the Prostate Cancer Foundation

Founded in 1993 by Mike Milken, the Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCF) is a leading philanthropic organization dedicated to funding prostate cancer research. PCF has raised over $1 billion to support more than 2,615 research projects at 312 cancer centers across 29 countries. The foundation is committed to ending death and suffering from prostate cancer. More information is available at pcf.org.