NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Clark Atlanta University tomorrow will publicly launch its Collaborative Cancer Genomics Center, a collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology and St. Joseph's Hospital in Atlanta that was funded with federal and regional public and private funds.
The CCGC will be a partnership between CAU's Center for Cancer Research and Therapeutic Development, and Georgia Tech's Integrative Cancer Research Center, and it will integrate knowledge and resources from both universities.
The collaboration will focus on the underlying causes of prostate, ovarian, pancreatic, and lung cancer, and will involve using samples from St. Joseph's, sequencing from CAU, and bioinformatics services from GT. Specifically, St. Joseph's Hospital and the Ovarian Cancer Institute will examine and provide patient samples for the program and will work with GT and CAU to interpret and evaluate the data resulting from CAU's sequencing.
The CCGC was funded by the Georgia Research Alliance, and it will use funds from CAU's grants.
CAU's cancer research is funded in part under two five-year National Institutes of Health grants for cancer research, including $7.8 million from the National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities and $6.8 million from the National Center for Research Resources.
CAU also recently was approved by the Health Resources and Services Administration for $420,000 for construction or instrumentation spending, Shafiq Khan, a Professor and Chair at CAU's Department of Biological Sciences, and Director of the Center for Cancer Research and Therapeutic Development, told GenomeWeb Daily News today.
Khan said that the cancer center most likely will use the NCRR funding to help cover the costs of next-gen sequencing technologies, which could include one or two sequencers, but he said the researchers have yet to decide which technologies best fit their purposes.