Newswise — Bethesda, MD – The new COL (Ret.) David G. McLeod Prostate Cancer Translational Research Fellowship was awarded to Dr. Prachi Mishra, Dec. 7 at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USU), in a ceremony in front of Department of Defense and industry leaders, cancer scientists, military healthcare providers and other colleagues.

Mishra is a research fellow in the Breast and Prostate Cancer Unit of the Laboratory of Human Carcinogenesis at the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health. 

The Fellowship was established through a partnership among USU, The Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine, Inc. (HJF), and BERG, a Boston-based biopharma company, which also provided funding for the fellowship. 

The award will support an outstanding biomedical researcher to further accelerate the progress of an ongoing cooperative research and development agreement among USU’s Center for Prostate Disease Research, HJF and BERG. This partnership has been instrumental in groundbreaking discoveries using sera from a racially diverse prostate cancer patient population in the equal-access military health care setting, and BERG’s multi-omics and artificial intelligence platforms. The joint endeavor addresses the major challenge in the management of prostate cancer: a lack of biomarkers for differentiating indolent prostate cancer from aggressive disease, before treatment decisions are made, as well as during and following the course of treatment.

Mishra will work to develop precise markers obtained from blood and other biofluids to complement current predictive approaches in the management of patients throughout the continuum of the disease. The markers could help physicians determine which patients with indolent disease should be directed to active surveillance and which patients with disease progression should be directed to appropriate treatment groups.

Retired Army Col. (Dr.) David G. McLeod, for whom the fellowship is named, was also recognized during the ceremony. McLeod was presented with an award recognizing his contributions to prostate cancer research and treatment for nearly half a century. He retired in 2016 as founding director of the Center for Prostate Disease Research (CPDR) at USU.

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The Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USU), founded by an act of Congress in 1972, is the academic heart of the Military Health System. USU students are primarily active-duty uniformed officers in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Public Health Service who receive specialized education in tropical and infectious diseases, TBI and PTSD, disaster response and humanitarian assistance, global health, and acute trauma care. A large percentage of the university’s more than 5,800 physician and 900 advanced practice nursing alumni are supporting operations around the work, offering their leadership and experience. USU’s graduate programs in biomedical sciences and public health are committed to excellence in research and oral biology. The university’s research program covers a wide range of clinical and basic science important to both the military and public health. For more information, visit www.usuhs.edu.

USU’s Center for Prostate Disease Research/Prostate Cancer Center of Excellence is part of the USU/Walter Reed National Military Medical Center Department of Surgery. The center is a state-of-the-art translational research program and an integral component of the John P. Murtha Cancer Center, conducting studies on prostate cancer and prostate disease in the Military Healthcare System. Since its inception in 1992, the center has developed a comprehensive prostate cancer database within the Department of Defense, with more than 29,000 prostate subjects enrolled to date. As a leading prostate cancer research center, CPDR is credited for groundbreaking discoveries and prostate cancer clinical trials at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.