WASHINGTON, June 18 (UPI) -- Congress is poised to ruin Father's Day for millions by cutting funding for prostate cancer research, a U.S. group devoted to ending prostate cancer says.
Skip Lockwood, the chief executive officer of ZERO, The Project to End Prostate Cancer, says the House Appropriations Committee approved a bill that would reduce by 20 percent the Prostate Cancer Research Program, part of the Department of Defense's Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program for fiscal year 2012.
Since 2006, funding for the program had been $80 million a year to develop new drugs, but for next year the funding would drop to $64 million, Lockwood says.
Department of Defense funding has lead to new prostate cancer drugs reaching U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval in 2010 and 2011 -- Amen's Xgeva, which reduces bone breaks and other skeletal complications and Johnson & Johnson's Zytiga, a second-line treatment for castration-resistant prostate cancer, Lockwood says.
"Prostate cancer affects one in six men and disproportionally affects our nation's veterans," Lockwood says in a statement. "This decision by Congress will punish veterans who have already sacrificed a great deal for their country."
Without this research funding, prostate cancer drugs that are currently available and saving lives would still remain in clinical trials, Lockwood adds.
Veterans exposed to chemical agents such as Agent Orange in Vietnam and other chemicals in the Middle East are twice as likely to develop prostate cancer as their civilian counterparts, Lockwood says.
