Scientific Goals and Emphases
The overarching goal of the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center is to shepherd new approaches to cancer prevention, detection, and treatment into clinical and population settings, where they can be tested and evaluated. Multidisciplinary programs -- which include lab scientists, clinical investigators, providers of patient care, epidemiologists, and sociobehavioral scientists -- facilitate this process by focusing research on relevant issues to patients and persons at risk of cancer. Collaboration across disciplines ensures that insights gained in the lab can move quickly and effectively to cancer patients' bedsides and to cancer prevention and control programs.
Many of the Cancer Center's research programs are organized around organ or disease sites, but because cancers also have common causes and underlying similarities, other programs address overarching themes such as defects in cell cycle control, involvement of immunologic mechanisms, and global changes in gene copy number and chromosome arrangement.
Exemplifying the breadth and depth of UCSF's research strengths are its SPORE grants (Specialized Programs Of Research Excellence), sponsored by the National Cancer Institute. SPOREs are prestigious initiatives that engage lab-based and population scientists, clinical investigators, and advocates in focused areas of research. UCSF has been awarded SPORE grants for breast cancer, in operation since 1992; for prostate cancer, since 2001; and for brain tumor, awarded in 2002. UCSF is one of only seven institutions that have three or more such SPORE grants.
As an example of the Center's large and expanding program of epidemiologic and population-based research, a new Bay Area Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Center studies the impact of prenatal-to-adult environmental exposures that may predispose women to breast cancer.
The Center's research programs are supported by a variety of shared resources, or cores, which represent state-of-the-art support services and technology for clinicians, laboratory scientists, epidemiologists, and sociobehavioral scientists.
In 2006, the Cancer Center entered a special affiliation relationship with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Leveraging unique strengths at both institutions, the affiliation encompasses mutual interests in cancer research and technological discovery. Collaborative opportunities extend to joint proposals for extramural funding as well as to leadership positions at the Cancer Center by LBNL investigators. The range of scientific interests represented by the new affiliation is extremely broad, encompassing areas within cancer biology, cancer therapy, computational biology, multi-scale imaging, technology, and genomics.
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