(OVERALL): Individuals from underserved minority communities in the U.S. experience poor outcomes for the majority of cancers as a result of inequities in access to high quality healthcare, socio-cultural and environmental determinants, and in some cases behavioral and biologic factors. Inequities in cancer outcomes are rooted in a wide range of structural, socio-cultural, and policy-related determinants that are operative throughout the U.S., but local factors can perpetuate and influence the magnitude of disparate cancer outcomes. To some extent, high cancer mortality among racial and ethnic minority segments of the population is a national manifestation of a wide range of local problems. A promising strategy to address cancer disparities is to foster research to understand local patterns of cancer mortality and root causes of disparities, and to test interventions informed by those findings that account for the needs of the local community. This paradigm for addressing cancer disparities has been successfully employed by a large cadre of cancer researchers at the University of Illinois Cancer Center (UICC) for more than a decade and forms the basis of the UICC vision to be a ?bench- to-community? NCI-designated cancer center. Governors State University (GSU) has invested substantially in basic science and health science infrastructure, increased efforts to recruit faculty members with an interest in research, and significantly enhanced research support services over the past several years. As a result, GSU is positioned to address growing cancer disparities in their community. The overall goal of this proposal is to develop additional infrastructure that will build on the strengths of the partnering institutions in order to enhance their capacity to conduct cancer health inequities research that is driven by local data and informed by the cancer-related needs of local communities.
(OVERALL): The GUIDE (GSU-UICC-Disparities-Education) Cancer Research Training Project is a collaborative initiative between GSU and UICC. The institutions will jointly conduct a pilot research project addressing a local, cancer-related health disparity and will develop a training program for GSU junior faculty and undergraduate students designed to attract and prepare investigators for careers in cancer disparities.
