Massey Cancer Center (MCC) at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) brings together faculty across the university to foster interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research strategies aimed at prevention, control, and ultimately the cure of cancer through translation of basic, clinical, and population science. The overall goal of research at MCC is to improve the health and lives of individuals affected by or at risk for cancer, with a particular focus on the high cancer burden in the MCC catchment area, which has a high percentage of underserved and minority populations. Collaborative research is conducted both within and among the 4 scientific programs in Cancer Cell Signaling, Cancer Molecular Genetics, Developmental Therapeutics, and Cancer Prevention and Control, as well as through cross-cutting scientific themes. As a matrix cancer center organized within the VCU Health Sciences division, MCC promotes collaborative research among faculty in the schools of medicine, nursing, dentistry, and pharmacy. Translational research is facilitated through disease- specific focus groups that engage basic, clinical, and prevention and control researchers, as well as clinical care providers. MCC also engages members from the schools of engineering, humanities and sciences, and social work to maximize transdisciplinary research collaborations. Developmental funds are used to support the initial research endeavors of newly recruited faculty and to encourage innovative collaborative research through peer-reviewed pilot research grants that require at least 2 collaborating investigators. To give members access to new technologies and high-quality methodologies and to facilitate successful research, MCC supports 7 shared resources: Microscopy, Lipidomics and Metabolomics, Flow Cytometry, Biostatistics, Cancer Informatics, Tissue and Data Acquisition and Analysis, and Transgenic Mouse. To accelerate translation and dissemination of research findings, MCC supports a full-service Clinical Trials Office that coordinates movement of programmatic scientific concepts through multidisciplinary and disease-specific focus groups into early-phase clinical trials and supports high-priority NCI-sponsored trials. Both clinical trials and cancer care delivery research are extended to greater Virginia through a Minority Based NCI Community Oncology Research Program (MU-NCORP). MCC members currently hold over $36 million in NCI-recognized peer-reviewed (> 35% NCI) funding and of the 158 grants in the portfolio, 106 (56%) are highly cancer specific. The research highlighted in this application stems from 1700 member publications in peer-reviewed journals (~14% of which appear in journals with impact factors of 8 and above since 2012). The upward trajectory of high-impact peer-reviewed collaborative research, guided by center strategic planning and evaluation, illustrates the effectiveness of MCC senior leadership in organizing and coordinating the faculty and resources of VCU to focus them on resolving cancer-related problems.
The mission of Massey Cancer Center is to serve Virginia and the nation as an internationally recognized comprehensive research and treatment center dedicated to improving the quality of human life by eliminating suffering and death through development and delivery of more effective means for the detection, treatment, prevention, control and ultimate cure of cancer. The core of this mission is to facilitate interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary cancer research so as to harness the considerable intellectual talent and scientific resources of VCU and focus them on solving the nation?s cancer problem.
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