Molecular Medicine »Expertise and Facilities

Expertise

• A freestanding NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center whose resources are completely focused on the cancer problem.
• Over 90 percent of patients "biobanked" through a centrally organized and controlled, well annotated tissue and fluid biosample repository facility.
• Robust Phase I clinical trials program wih an unusually large portfolio of studies (enrolls about 200 patients per year).
• A large, nationally recognized, multidisciplinary clinical and research program to identify, study, and care for individuals with inherited predisposition to cancer syndromes.

• Deep scientific strength in cell signaling, functional genetics, and antibody engineering.

Gene Sequencing

The immediate objective of the Institute for Personalized Medicine is to sequence exons from genes known to impact key, targetable, signaling pathways in patients with metastatic disease

Our vision is one in which at the time of diagnosis and again at disease progression, a patient's cancer will be sequenced either for selected genes of interest or the entire genome. The resultant information will be housed in a searchable database, thereby allowing patients to be matched to particular drugs based upon mechanism of action, regardless of the phase of clinical trial. Updated eligibility criteria will no longer state the requirement for a given disease but instead will articulate a far more sophisticated paradigm focusing on pathway activation, gene amplification, gene mutation, or combinations thereof.