The University of Colorado Comprehensive Cancer Center (UC4) plans to create an academic private public partnership (AP4) Cancer Therapy Center (UC4/AP4 CTC). The goal for this application is to plan the UC4/AP4 Center. We will do this by establishing an Executive Committee comprised of the Director, the four university investigators who will direct research projects, six private pharma/biotechnology partners, and two public partners. Over the twelve months of the award, the Executive Committee will hold planning meetings to develop a strategic plan, finalize initial research projects and prepare an AP4 application. During the planning year we will identify and meet with our partners, assemble a multidisciplinary team, establish the administrative center, write a strategic plan, establish a scientific advisory committee, and write an application. The strategic plan will define the mission of the Center and its research priorities. It will contain the key elements of the Center's administrative structure, including Executive Committee functions, governance, polices and procedures; membership agreements and fees; patent coverage; and evaluation processes. In addition we will use the planning year to begin recruiting an Evaluator, a full-time Administrator and a senior investigator who will assist with program management. Ultimately, the goal of the UC4/AP4 Center will be to rapidly develop therapeutic and chemoprevention agents for cancer using individual tumor and tumor stroma data rather than histology as a means to select patients to receive new agents under development with pre-clinical and clinical trials. Biologic/biomarker end points rather than toxicity endpoints will be utilized to determine the efficacy of the agent. These goals will be accomplished through four research/project areas: 1) signal transduction inhibitors (D. Chan, PI); 2) vaccine/ DNAI/ RNA therapy (R. Garcea, PI); 3) angiogenic inhibitors/ PK/ PD modeling (S.G. Eckhardt, PI); and 4) chemoprevention agents (R. Nemenoff, PI).
