Prostate cancer research grants awarded

The Prostate Cancer Foundation in Santa Monica, Calif., said Friday it awarded nearly $10 million to bankroll 10 innovative research projects into the disease.

The Challenge Awards are valued at $9.8 million over three years and were selected from 59 proposals from cancer centers around the world by a peer-review panel at the Southern California foundation.

"These newly funded programs form an excellent, patient-centric research portfolio," said Howard Soule, executive vice president and chief science officer for PCF. "With reductions in federal funding for prostate cancer research, it's imperative for us to seek the most promising research ideas and fund them with the goal of changing clinical practice and improving outcomes for patients with advanced prostate cancer."

The projects selected by the PCF do not currently enjoy federal funding and are considered "highly innovative research with potential near-term patient benefit," the foundation said in a written statement.

The grants went to labs studying areas including nanotechnology, imaging and chemotherapy compounds such as Zytiga and LX184.

The institutions receiving grants were: Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden Hospital, University of California, San Francisco, UW Carbone Cancer Center, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Johns Hopkins Cancer and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Air Force cancels nuclear ethics briefings

The U.S. Air Force has halted a presentation for missile launch officers on the ethics of nuclear weapons because of objections to its religious content.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation said it was approached by 31 officers upset by the briefing, CNN reported Thursday. Chaplains at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California had been doing the briefing for almost two decades.

"There were several things that they found disgusting," Mikey Weinstein, who founded the watchdog group, said. "The first was the fact that there is actually a slide that makes it clear that they're trying to teach that, under fundamentalist Christian doctrine, war is a good thing."

Weinstein said he and others in the foundation were "literally blown away" by some of the slides. One quoted Revelations describing Jesus Christ as a "mighty warrior."

The Pentagon canceled the briefings last week. Senior Air Force officials said they did not know of the content.