Cancer Center Support Grant

OVERALL: DIRECTOR'S OVERVIEW & SIX ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center (CFCCC) of the University of California, Irvine (UCI) is the only NCI-designated cancer center based in Orange County, the 6th most populous county in the U.S. that serves as our Catchment Area and is home to ~1% of the nation's people. Now entering its 27th year, the CFCCC will enact its new Strategic Plan to enhance its role as a vital resource for the people of Orange County and surrounding areas in southern California to generate and disseminate new knowledge about the causes, prevention, and treatment of cancer, to train of the next generation of cancer providers and caregivers, and to alleviate the overall burden of cancer on our residents. The CFCCC has 195 members drawn from 32 academic departments across nine Schools at UCI, including the Schools of Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences, Population & Public Health, Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences, Information & Computer Science, Engineering, and Business. Our parent institution, UCI, has been consistently ranked in the top 10 of public universities in the U.S., while our CFCCC members are supported by $29.2 million in total annual extramural peer-reviewed cancer research funding, including $9.3 million from the NCI. Our members published 1,792 cancer-focused, peer-reviewed publications from 2015-2020, of which 73% are collaborative and 20% are in high-impact journals. CFCCC research is organized into three Research Programs that provide an interactive and collaborative infrastructure for cancer discovery, clinical investigation including early phase and investigator-initiated trials, and population-based cancer research. These include two Programs spanning basic, translational, and clinical cancer research, Biotechnology, Imaging & Drug Development (BIDD) and Systems, Pathways & Targets (SPT), as well as Cancer Control (CC), our population science Program. The Programs are further linked by seven CFCCC Disease-Oriented Teams that bring together basic, translational, clinical and population investigators to facilitate the movement of CFCCC discoveries through the pipeline into the clinical arena. CFCCC research is supported by seven Shared Resources that provide our members access to specialized services, technology and instrumentation, and expert consultation and collaboration. These Shared Resources include the Transgenic Mouse Facility, Optical Biology Core, Genomic High-Throughput Facility, In Vivo Functional Onco-Imaging, Experimental Tissue Resource, Biostatistics Shared Resource, and the Biobehavioral Shared Resource. Clinical research is supported by the Stern Center for Cancer Clinical Trials & Research, the CFCCC clinical trials office. With this competing renewal application, the CFCCC requests CCSG funding for the next 5 years to support our Administration, Developmental Funds, Program and Senior Leadership, Community Outreach & Engagement, Cancer Research Training & Educational Coordination, Shared Resources, Clinical Protocol & Data Management, and Protocol Review & Monitoring, to allow the CFCCC to continue its mission.