The HICCC is organized to maximize interdisciplinary coordination, collaboration and planning as a matter of routine, and to actively identify and exploit new opportunities as they arise. From our perspective, the most critical elements that have contributed to our current success, and lay the foundation for our future trajectory, are: 1) The appointment of seasoned, senior leaders with the ability and commitment to promoting interdisciplinary research efforts;2) The focus on disease-specific programs through which efforts in basic, clinical, and population science converge and the translational pipeline can ultimately impact patient care, policy and our local community. Thus, we highlight and utilize extant disease-specific programs, and support these via continuing investment, while at the same time continue to develop and support our programs that are committed to basic science discoveries and ways to prevent and control cancer in the community at large. At the same time, we look for possible new, emergent scientific themes, either within programs or cancer center-wide, which can succeed by virtue of additional recruitment and investment, but also build upon or extend our mission and core competencies;3) Contribution of all HICCC members to the intellectual lives of home Departments, where new advances (e.g. network biology, synthetic chemistry, proteomics, stem cell biology, tumor immunology, chromatic biochemistry) are likely to have great potential for interdisciplinary impact on cancer care, as they are exploited and integrated;4) Heavy investment in education and training, thereby creating an environment in which HICCC members and future members are constantly exposed to multiple areas of science and medicine relevant to their research careers. Over the past project period the HICCC has used these primary approaches to continue developing and honing the trans-disciplinary, translational focus of our research base. While sponsor responsibilities are the same for research conducted within a consortium versus research conducted with unaffiliated institutions, research within a consortium allows for more systems to be put in place to mitigate risk to the investigator and the institution. However, as part of the effort to further the goal of personalized medicine, higher risk research will continue to expand and these types of trials will become a larger part of our portfolio. In the prior CCSG review, the section on trans-disciplinary coordination and collaboration received a merit rating of
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