St. Francis Hospital on Tuesday signed a memorandum of understanding with Tuskegee University to establish a joint partnership for research on prostate cancer and its disproportionate mortality rates among African-American men.
The collaboration will include scientific research, testing and discovery towards finding a cure for prostate cancer.
As part of the new partnership Alabama-based Tuskegee University will receive tissue samples from prostate surgeries of African-American men performed at St. Francis’s Curtis D. Robinson Men’s Health Institute.
Researchers at Tuskegee University will use the tissue to study why black men are plagued with prostate cancer at such alarming rates.
“This partnership is a leading-edge, very novel approach to finding a cure for prostate cancer,” said Jeffrey Steinberg, the senior vice president for health policy and disparity at St. Francis Hospital. “We’re creating a research relationship with Tuskegee University and providing them with necessary materials to conduct research to further their understanding of how prostate cancer is passed on in African-American men and also to predict which cancers will be more aggressive,” added Steinberg.
The Tuskegee research program has previously had only random samples for its research. The new partnership will allow the university to routinely receive prostate cancer tissue from African-American men participating in the Men’s Health Institute at St. Francis.
