BOSTON — December 9, 1999 — Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, four of its other affiliated hospitals, and Harvard School of Public Health have launched a series of overlapping collaborations to create the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center (DF/HCC). The institutions, which also include Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Children’s Hospital, and Massachusetts General Hospital, conduct more than $235 million in cancer-related research each year.
By creating opportunities and incentives for collaboration among basic, clinical, and population researchers, the institutions expect to arrive more quickly at answers to questions about the cause of cancer, cancer prevention, and the effectiveness of potential therapies.
The executive and governance committees of the DF/HCC will meet tomorrow to discuss the new Center’s progress. One key step, the creation of an Intranet to connect the researcher, went live this week.
"One primary goal for this Center is to take advantage of current trends in biomedical science that focus upon multidisciplinary research to yielding exciting new advances," said Harvard Medical School Dean Joseph B. Martin. "The new Center is already creating this research synergy because we know researchers have found each other through its programs who would not have through our old system."
"All of the DF/HCC member institutions conduct incredible basic, clinical, and population-based research," said Dana-Farber President David G. Nathan. "Now we will have the mechanisms to knit these efforts together to share resources and coordinate our efforts in a more focused and efficient manner."
Martin and Nathan initiated discussions more than two years ago that have resulted in the DF/HCC. By this past spring more than 800 Harvard faculty based at the various institutions had signed on to become members of the Center. More than half of
those researchers have already begun collaborative projects. Over the summer the institutions committed significant funds to create or enhance 17 core facilities, ranging from DNA sequencing operations to pathology labs, that will be available to all members. Activities carried out under the DF/HCC banner will occupy nearly 500,000 square feet of space at the institutions.
One cornerstone of the new Center is its hoped-to-be designation by the National Cancer Institute as an official NCI Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dana-Farber has had such a designation for 26 years and a grant proposal was submitted October 1 that would expand the scope of the current designation to include all the members of the DF/HCC.
The initial phase of the DF/HCC has created disease-based programs for five types of cancer: breast, gynecologic, leukemia, lymphoma, and prostate. As these programs move forward, the Center will be developing collaborative programs for seven other types of cancer: brain, gastrointestinal, head and neck, skin, soft tissue sarcomas, lung, and AIDS-related malignancies.
The five existing disease-based programs are designed to interact with ten discipline-based programs that include biostatistics, cancer cell biology, cancer genetics, cancer immunology, viral oncology, cancer epidemiology, risk reduction, outcomes research, cancer imaging, and experimental therapeutics. Another nine discipline-based programs are envisioned for development over the next few years, including palliative care and cancer nursing research.
A key element of the DF/HCC, and the component that will get the bulk of any NCI Comprehensive Cancer Center grant resources, are the 18 core facilities. These tend to be large, highly instrumented labs that are generally too expensive for any one researcher, or often, any one institution, to initiate. One example is the "vector core" that will be developing special viruses and other vectors to ferry desired genes into cells to genetically correct an error that has led to cancer. Other core facilities provide non-laboratory services like health communication to high-risk populations.
Through the cores and disease-based and discipline-based programs the Center has created the forum and structure to enable researchers from all disciplines to synthesize the vast amount of information generated by individual studies and more rapidly mine it to develop new intervention strategies.
Contact: Victoria Brady, MGH Public Affairs
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