I can't figure this out. Every time the PCF is brought up people say that nothing they do will benefit them because they live outside of the US. They also state that the PCF only funds awareness programs like coloring books and stuff.

Are people incapable of actually reading the website which goes over the scientific research and postdoctoral fellowship grants that they give out? Is it very hard to read about what kind of research they fund?

I'm going to insert something I wrote on r/games going over it because the crux of my point is contained within that text.

Can I just ask why you think that the PCF funding internally in the US matters and why you think the charity only funds the prevention of cancer?

You can actually look at their website and see the grants they have given out to researchers. Limiting funding to the US only doesn't really mean that the rest of the world doesn't benefit. A lab in the US discovering a new biomarker for early detection of a cancer doesn't mean that only people in the US benefit from that knowledge.

That's like telling me that NIH grants, which fund US investigators, only benefits the US. The entire world gains benefit from the research that comes out of US research labs. Would you also like to say that because the majority of pharmaceutical research is performed in the US that only the US has drugs and cancer medications? That's nonsense.

Every time someone brings up PCF they state that it only funds "prevention" and doesn't actually "cure" cancer. Did you bother to look at what they fund? Do you know what biomarkers are and how we use them? Do you know how microbiome markers and dietary intake can influence or cause cancer? Did you know that there's a urine test for bladder cancer that can detect it months before you would ever detect it visually or begin seeing blood in the urine? This can buy people time before the tumor progresses and becomes more invasive or aggressive. This has a direct benefit to the survival rates of cancer. Early detection and biomarker development is very important.

Their awards for 2014 include a researcher who has found out that a specific bacteria can accelerate the growth of colorectal cancer. The bacteria can even cause cancer. They're trying to study the genetic differences between the strains of the bacteria that cause cancer and those that don't. They could potentially identify a specific marker that you could pick up in stool samples saying "hey you have this strain of a bacteria that we know causes cancer, better give you more frequent colonoscopies and check up on you more often."

One grant is a researcher trying to focus and re-tool animal models to use older animals, which may better reflect cancer formation in older humans than using 4-week old mice does.

One grant is studying inhibitors of the arginine-Nitric Oxide pathway for its role in slowing the growth of and potentially preventing bladder cancer development.

Another grant is to a guy who has developed a new class of cancer drugs and wants to screen them for effectiveness in TNBC.

Another grant is for a guy who is developing a micro RNA array to screen lesions in the mouth in the hopes that he can find specific miRNA that doctors can use to say "this lesion is precancerous and not just a normal/benign thing."

So looking at the research side of things they spend between 500,000 and 1,000,000/yr on research grants that may include (this is directly from the application guidelines):

• Research projects which, if successful, may lead directly to reducing the incidence of cancer*
• Primary and secondary prevention research on all types of cancers
• Creative or innovative approaches to cancer prevention research

*Examples of such projects include, but are not limited to: research that leads to improvement in early detection and intervention, research into dietary links to cancer, behavioral/educational aspects of cancer prevention, epidemiological and genetic studies that may have a direct impact on cancer prevention, and primary prevention programs that focus on children and adolescents.

This is in addition to the postdoctoral fellowships that they award, which pay as much as an NIH F33.

That's over half of their program expenses going to something that most people don't even realize fits into "cancer prevention". As a cancer researcher myself, I would wager no one would suspect those research projects were being funded as "cancer prevention". A good amount of the awards over the past few years are to projects that aren't even prevention, they're for treatment development. This is in addition to the community projects they fund to help alleviate some of the dietary and life choice causes of cancer.

TL;DR - To write PCF off just because they fund "prevention" is stupid. Complaining that they only fund things in the US is a worthless complaint. Who would you suggest they donate to? The Leukemia & Lymphoma society or the ACS aren't any better (they are worse). There are a few better ones if you just mainly care about funding research and nothing else.

edit: Just want to say that disliking PCF for other reasons like their finances or what have you is fine, but the constant shitposting that it's an awareness charity that funds nothing of value to the world is wrong.