Scientists at Dundee University have been given £500,000 to investigate prostate cancer.
The money will be used for clinical research being carried out on patients for the first time in the hope of improving diagnosis of the deadly disease and finding ways to reduce the number of men undergoing unnecessary biopsies.
More than half the funding has come from the charities Prostate Cancer UK and the Movember Foundation, with the Scottish Government’s chief scientist office putting up the rest.
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer affecting men in Scotland, with around 3,000 men being diagnosed each year and 800 dying, although survival rates have improved significantly in the past decade.
There is a need to find new ways to tell the difference between aggressive and non-aggressive forms, as the latter may not need radical treatment.
The five-year research project will be led by Ghulam Nabi, from the university’s school of medicine and will focus on MRI and ultrasound scans.
Mr Nabi said: “The current process for diagnosing prostate cancer involves several steps, each with their own built-in uncertainties.
“It is my hope that the work I am able to do with this funding will lead to more streamlined diagnoses, with fewer biopsies and the potential to tell the difference between aggressive and non-aggressive forms of prostate cancer.
“Small studies suggest using a special type of MRI before a biopsy can help to achieve these aims. This funding allows me and my team to expand these studies into a large trial, with better comparison methods and more rigorous protocols.”
Health secretary Alex Neil said: “Prostate cancers range from very slow-growing and potentially harmless to highly aggressive and life-threatening. More work needs to be done to identify how advanced a tumour is.”
Dr Iain Frame, director of research at Prostate Cancer UK, said every year almost as many men are diagnosed with prostate cancer as women are diagnosed with breast cancer but “research into prostate cancer has suffered from a historic legacy of neglect”.
“Men are dying needlessly due to inadequate methods of testing for the disease,” he said. “Through funding research projects of this nature, we are determined to right this long-standing wrong.”