The PCCTC’s IRONMAN Registry Receives PCF Challenge Award

January 31, 2023 | Press Releases

Principal Investigators Lorelei Mucci, ScD, MPH (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health), and Daniel George, MD (Duke University) were named recipients of a 2022 Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCF) Challenge Award for their proposal, IRONMAN: Enhancing Survivorship in Patients with Advanced Prostate Cancer. The IRONMAN Registry (ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT03151629) is managed by the Prostate Cancer Clinical Trials Consortium (PCCTC).

Survivorship is a field of oncology which aims to understand and improve quality of life in patients living with or after cancer. Drs. Mucci, George, and team’s project focuses on understanding patients’ cancer experience and quality of life, their prognosis, and treatment disparities. These findings will inform practice, identify unmet needs, reduce disparities, and identify strategies for advanced prostate cancer patients to flourish. Details of the proposal were outlined by PCF:


  • Patients with advanced prostate cancer are at greatest risk of cancer death, but also suffer quality of life deterioration and adverse events due to the cancer and its therapies.
  • Understanding the factors that impact survivorship outcomes, risk factors for adverse events, and unmet needs of patients, will allow the identification of opportunities and strategies for helping patients to thrive despite living with advanced prostate cancer.
  • IRONMAN is a global registry that collects real-world clinical, demographic, and lifestyle data, as well as tissue and blood samples, from patients newly diagnosed with metastatic hormone sensitive or castration resistant prostate cancer.
  • In this project, Drs. Lorelei Mucci, Daniel George, and team will leverage data from IRONMAN on over 1,500 patients with advanced prostate cancer, to study the relationships between clinical, demographic and lifestyle factors, with survivorship outcomes, with a focus on racial health disparities.
  • How patient-reported quality of life domains such as cognitive function, sleep quality, pain, fatigue, and psychosocial health are associated with demographic, clinical, and lifestyle factors including physical activity, will be investigated, to identify factors that predict flourishing after diagnosis of advanced prostate cancer.
  • The impact of patient demographic and clinical factors on treatment decisions, treatment disparities, and clinical outcomes will be investigated.
  • “Biological aging,” which can be measured by analyzing the state of DNA, may be accelerated past a patient’s chronological age by hormonal therapy and comorbidities. The relationships between biological age and quality of life measurements, serious adverse events, and overall survival, will be investigated.




    • If successful, this IRONMAN project will identify relationships between clinical, demographic, and lifestyle factors, and patient quality of life and outcomes. This will enable the identification of strategies for improving quality of life, extending survival, and reducing health disparities for patients with advanced prostate cancer.

    For more information on IRONMAN visit https://ironmanregistry.org/

    To learn more about the 2022 PCF Challenge Awards visit https://www.pcf.org/c/challenge-awards-class-of-2022/

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