The faculty of the Arizona Cancer Center will establish a Clinical Oncology Research Training Program. The objective of this program is to train physicians in laboratory-based clinical research. The trainees will develop expertise in a cancer-related laboratory discipline, use it to ask clinically relevant questions and through it, develop clinical research programs in cancer diagnosis, prevention and therapy. Successful candidates for the program will have junior faculty appointments in one of the Departments of Gynecology, Internal Medicine, Pathology, Radiation Oncology or Surgery and will devote at least 75% of their time to the research training. Twenty-two core faculty and 21 support faculty with peer reviewed research funding, will participate in the training program and make their time, expertise and facilities available to the trainees. The training program will be directed and supervised by an advisory committee consisting of the relevant departmental chairs and program leaders and an education subcommittee. The trainees will undergo an initial six month period of orientation, laboratory experiences and preliminary studies prior to the identification and approval of a research program and a mentor faculty. Subsequently, the clinical research program will be conducted and will be monitored by periodic reviews of both written and orally presented data. Didactic courses as well as formal and informal seminar series will be utilized to round out the training of the selected faculty. The Arizona Cancer Center is uniquely qualified to conduct this training program because of its several multidisciplinary program project grants, its intense network of multidisciplinary collaborative studies, its major orientation which is to translate basic and laboratory observations into clinical therapeutic modalities and its track record of training oncologists who have subsequently entered careers In academic clinical research. The highly developed cancer prevention, epidemiology and biometry programs of the Arizona Cancer Center will also contribute greatly to this program. The anticipated outcome is the training of a cadre of physicians capable of playing a leadership role in developmental clinical oncology research.
