Who We Are, What We've Done, Where We're Going

In 2002, the National Cancer Institute, a branch of the National Institutes of Health awarded the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center a five-year, $12.7 million grant to lead a multi-center, five-year investigation into the genetic mechanisms of prostate cancer progression. Understanding how and why prostate cancer can turn deadly is key to developing therapies that may effectively treat men with recurrent or advanced prostate cancer, for which there is no cure.

Known as the Pacific NW Prostate Cancer SPORE (short for Specialized Programs of Research Excellence), the initiative involved more than 50 investigators in Seattle and Vancouver, B.C., and was led by Principal Investigator, Paul Lange, MD, Professor and Chair of Urology at the UW School of Medicine and an Affiliate Investigator in Fred Hutchinson's Public Health Sciences Division. The Co-Principal Investigator of the SPORE was Dr. Janet L. Stanford, PhD, Member and Research Professor in Fred Hutchinson's Public Health Sciences Division and Head of its Program in Prostate Cancer Research.

Participating institutions in Seattle were Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the University of Washington and the Institute for Systems Biology. Vancouver partners were the University of British Columbia and its affiliate, The Prostate Centre at Vancouver General Hospital.

In September 2006, Principal Investigator Dr. Peter Nelson, Member in Fred Hutchinson's Division of Human Biology and Co-Principal Investigators Stanford and Lange submitted a competing renewal application to continue this program for 5 more years. This renewal application was successfully funded with a new five-year, $11.8 million grant to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center that started in September, 2007, and includes three of the original institutions.

The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, home of three Nobel Prize laureates, is an independent, nonprofit research institution dedicated to the development and advancement of biomedical technology to eliminate cancer and related diseases as causes of human suffering and death. Fred Hutchinson receives more funding from the National Institutes of Health than any other independent U.S. research center. Recognized internationally for its pioneering work in bone-marrow transplantation, the center's four scientific divisions collaborate to form a unique environment for conducting basic and applied science. Fred Hutchinson is the only National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center in the Pacific Northwest and is one of 41 nationwide. www.fhcrc.org.

The University of Washington's faculty includes five Nobel Prize-winners, five MacArthur Fellows, and more than 40 members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. Its highly regarded School of Medicine has been ranked first in the nation in training primary-care physicians, and several of its graduate and professional programs are rated among the top 10 in their fields. Since 1975, the UW has been among the top public universities in receipt of federal research funds. www.washington.edu.

The Prostate Centre at Vancouver General Hospital, an affiliate of the University of British Columbia, is the largest comprehensive research and treatment centre of its kind in Canada with a focus exclusively on prostate disease. Home to Canada's largest gene array facility and Western Canada's only Training and Education Centre for Prostate Research, the Centre is a University of British Columbia Academic Centre of Excellence. The Prostate Centre is one of three centres of excellence located at Vancouver General Hospital, the primary adult referral and teaching hospital in Western Canada and a part of the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, the largest network of health organizations and services in Canada. www.prostatecentre.com and www.ubc.ca.

Founded in 1992, the Oregon Health and Science University Cancer Institute (OCI) is the only nationally designated cancer institute in Oregon. Renowned for its advances in cancer research, OHSU is also the state's No. 1 provider of cancer diagnosis and treatment. Members of four scientific programs (Cancer Biology, Hematologic Malignancies, Solid Tumor, and Cancer Prevention and Control) utilize eight well-established shared resources to perform outstanding research, convert research findings into treatments and preventive agents, and design clinical trials to validate molecular targets in the clinic. Embedded within the Solid Tumors program is the Prostate Cancer Focus Group. The group consists of over 20 investigators who pursue clinical, translational and basic research that tackles a broad range of challenges specific to prostate cancer. Collaborations between prostate cancer investigators at OHSU and those at FHCRC/UWMC have developed over the past five years, initially through joint efforts in clinical trials development and patient education, and more recently through translational scientific efforts.
www.ohsu.edu and www.ohsucancer.com

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