Celebrities for Prostate Cancer

A solemn note, if you’ve ever had a father, brother, son, business partner or friend who has suffered from prostate cancer, and we at Lux have, then you know the terrible impact it can have. 16 million currently face the disease. Next week Mike Milken & Jonathan Simons, MD host their amazing annual Prostate Cancer Foundation Dinner. Milken has long championed the most valuable form of capital: human capital.

And this evening focuses on funding the 2010 class of Young Investigators and building the human capital supply for continued research. They’ve already funded 20 and are targeting a total of 100. I’ve heard inside word that attendees include leading American philanthropists David Koch (Koch Industries), Peter Grauer (Bloomberg), Darius Bikoff (founder of Glaceau and Vitamin Water), Richard LeFrak (LeFrak Organization), Ambassador Earle I. Mack, Ted Virtue (MidOcean Partners), among others. Also, Jean Fogelberg, wife of Dan Fogelberg, the famed recording artist who died of prostate cancer in December 2007. If you’d like to attend contact jhaber@pcf.org or 310 570.4700.

Founded in 1993 to find better treatments and a cure for prostate cancer, the Prostate Cancer Foundation has become the world’s leading philanthropy for funding prostate-cancer research, almost like a venture fund that solicits and selects the most promising research programs and quickly funds them—now to the tune of 1,500 programs at nearly 200 research centers in 20 countries around the world. It’s helped to build a global research enterprise of nearly $10 billion.