This application represents the second competitive renewal of the CALGB institutional grant submission from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) and its affiliates. UNC-CH has been a member of CALGB since 1986. We have maintained an average annual accrual of 120 cases from 1992-1996 and with the addition of seven new affiliates, including the University of Alabama at Birmingham in the last three years, are projecting more than 150 in the coming years. Approximately 60 percent of our total accrual is from our affiliates. Our overall minority accrual of percent remains at two one-half times the group average. This has resulted in our obtaining a Minority Initiative Program Grant from the group for 1997 and an application from UNC for continued Minority Initiative Program funding during the coming Grant cycle. Our multidisciplinary efforts and significant contributions to surgical studies in the group has also resulted in our being one of 12 Group Institutions with funding from the Surgery Grant on which Dr. David Sugarbaker is the Principal Investigator. Moreover, our institution has demonstrated broad leadership participation in the group in Radiation Oncology, Leukemia, Lymphoma, Breast, Transplant, Correlative Sciences, Epidemiology, Pathology, Cancer Prevention and Control, and GI Cancer and is the research base for a Minority CCOP at our affiliate, the Medical College of Virginia. During the past funding cycle, we have had the distinction of having two committee chairs, four committee vice-chairs, one working group chair, 28 Core and Executive Committee members, 12 protocol principal investigators or co-investigators and two members of the Board of Directors. This has ranked UNC consistently among the top two or three institutions in the """"""""leadership"""""""" category of the internal CALGB Group scoring system. We plan to continue direct service to the group by maintaining an active reference laboratory in molecular epidemiology and an independently funded core facility for banking of germ line DNA for genetic studies in patients with breast cancer and other solid tumors. Although Dr. Edison Liu's departure to the NCI is a loss for UNC and the entire group, Ms. Lynn Dressler has extensive experience in performing correlative studies within the Cooperative Groups and will be more than able to continue the work which she and Dr. Liu had initiated. We believe that this application reflects the growing and crucial contribution that UNC-CH investigators provide to the group in leadership, science, and service as well as our commitment to increase accrual through the addition of major affiliates while maintaining rigorous quality control of data submission. We respectfully submit that this application demonstrates both the value of this institution to the group and the contributions that UNC-CH and its affiliates will provide in the future.
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