Large Movember grant to Tapio Visakorpi's research group

Professor Tapio Visakorpi and his research group at the University of Tampere are the recipients of the substantial Movember grant by the Cancer Society of Finland. The grant is EUR 200,000 and it was announced on 12 December 2012.

The money for the grant was raised by the Movember campaign in which Finnish men grew their moustaches for the month of November and donated money for research on prostate cancer.

The aim of Professor Visakorpi’s research project is to map the fundamental mechanisms of prostate cancer. Visakorpi says that these mechanisms will be investigated further later on to find out whether they could be useful in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease.

The study profiles changes in DNA and RNA as well as in DNA methylation. Tumour biopsies from patients are used together with the latest analysis methods.

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men and it is diagnosed in 4,700 Finnish men every year. A large number of patients do not need active treatment because the disease progresses so slowly that the patient often dies of old age. However, the aggressive form of the disease requires surgical or radiation treatment and possibly at a later stage also hormonal and cytostatic treatment.

Professor Visakorpi says that it would be important to be able to do differential diagnostics between the age-related prostate cancer and the type of prostate cancer that leads to death if left untreated. Hence the research looks for new markers of early-stage prostate cancer which will make the selection of the appropriate course of treatment more efficient.

”A large population data will be used to find out the prognostic significance of the markers,” Visakorpi says.

The research group is also looking for new target molecules for drug treatment in advanced cases of prostate cancer when current hormonal treatment no longer works.

The Cancer Society of Finland granted EUR 4.1 million to research on cancer in November. Among the grantees who received money for prostate cancer research are Professors Teuvo Tammela and Anssi Auvinen from the University of Tampere and Professor Johanna Schleutker from the University of Turku. Professor Schleutker’s research group works in the Institute of Biomedical Technology (IBT) at the University of Tampere. Professor Olli Silvennoinen and his research group received funding for the research project “Regulation of cytokine in cancer”.

Cancer Society of Finland grants in 2012

News source: The press release from the Cancer Society of Finland (in Finnish)

For further information please contact:
Professor Tapio Visakorpi
Tel. +358 (0)50 318 5829, tapio.visakorpi@uta.fi