The mission of the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center is to promote and facilitate basic and clinical research on the incidence, etiology, and progression of cancer, and then through education and direct application of the results of such research, translate the discoveries into improved methods for cancer prevention, detection, diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy. The ultimate goal is to relieve the burdens of illness in patients with cancer. Accordingly, Mayo Clinic Cancer Center research is broad and interdisciplinary, but highly cancer focused. Professional and public education activities are excellent and expansive, and clinical and psychosocial care of patients are of the highest quality and humanistic. These aggregate characteristics form the basis for our request for CCSG support and to continue our designation by the National Cancer Institute as a Comprehensive Cancer Center. The scientific objectives are met through twelve research programs whose members are drawn mostly from the principal site at Mayo Clinic Rochester, but also from components at Jacksonville and Scottsdale. The twelve research programs are: Genetic Epidemiology and Risk Assessment; Cancer Prevention and Control Cell Biology; Developmental Therapeutics; Cancer Imaging; Immunology and Immunotherapy; Gene and Virus Therapy; Prostate Cancer; Hematologic Malignancies; Neuro-oncology; Women's Cancer: and Gastrointestinal Cancer. This represents a net increase of five programs since our last review. Eighteen shared resources support the scientific initiatives. Scientific and fiscal administration of the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center is now stable, experienced, and robust, and we enjoy consistent and substantial support from Mayo Foundation leadership for our activities at all three Mayo sites. Plans for the future are guided by an uncompromising focus on creating and sustaining a Cancer Center that uses its own scientific capabilities and achievements and those of others for the gain of patients with cancer globally. Accordingly, substantial attention is being paid to research programs which elucidate the basic mechanisms of cancer etiology and optimize our ability to determine disease risk factors, thereby enabling better prevention, the development of better tools for early diagnosis, the design of novel therapeutics for stratified diseases, and the improvement of patients' quality of life, especially through neurobiologically based methods for palliation of pain.
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