Health Sciences Media Relations
USC Receives $5 Million to Support Innovative Cancer Research
May 13, 2008
Whittier Foundation gift will help the discovery of new therapies and cancer detectorsLos Angeles, Calif., May 12, 2008- Continuing its support of medical innovation, the L.K. Whittier Foundation announced it is expanding upon the cutting-edge research initiatives at the USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center.
This $5 million gift will extend funding of the L.K. Whittier Foundation Innovative Tailored Therapies Initiative at USC/Norris and the Keck School of Medicine of USC. The foundation previously supported establishing this initiative back in 2002.
Created in 1955 by Leland K. Whittier and the Whittier Family, the Los Angeles-based foundation supports innovative endeavors in education, the sciences, and health and medicine.
The L.K. Whittier Foundation Innovative Tailored Therapies Initiative at USC/Norris is a multi-year program to address the needs of scientists in developing successful new therapies to treat cancer patients. This latest gift will support the program for five years.
Obtaining funding for the early stages of a research idea—no matter how exciting—can be extremely difficult. It requires writing long proposals to committees that rule on scientific merit.
That time and effort is often better spent in the laboratory. This gift will help alleviate some of those pressures.
"The Whittier Initiative has been instrumental in enabling more than 40 faculty physicians to conduct pilot research studies,” says Peter Jones, Ph.D., director of USC/Norris. "These studies have led to additional federal funding, clinical trials and publications, and continue to push the cancer research frontier in our quest to deliver more effective therapies.”
Funding from the Whittier Foundation has led directly to patients receiving access to new non-toxic therapies, the development of new detectors for lung cancer plus the discovery of new makers to predict the response of colon and breast cancer patients to therapy.
The USC/Norris committee created by the initiative makes funding decisions and stays with the project all the way through, says Jones.
Tailoring therapies for individuals and predicting a patient’s cancer risk is a hallmark of USC/Norris, says Jones. And that is the sort of science the Whittier initiative was designed to fund — science that could make a difference in the lives of USC/Norris cancer patients and, ultimately, cancer patients everywhere.
"A researcher’s success is usually measured by how much grant funding he or she receives," says Jones. "Here, we want to measure them by the fact that they actually did something to help patients. The Foundation’s gift allows us to do that.”
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