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UCSD Lands $1M for Personalized Cancer Center

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The University of California, San Diego said yesterday that it will use a $1 million donation to fund its new Center for Personalized Cancer Therapy, an initiative of the UCSD Moores Cancer Center and UCSD Health System.

The $1 million gift is from San Diego philanthropists Joan and Irwin Jacobs.

The new center is headed by Director Razelle Kurzrock, who was recruited to UCSD last year from the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and whose work has focused on using personalized, molecular approaches in clinical trials.

A National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center, the Moores center is currently involved in more than 200 clinical trials for new therapeutics, and part of its focus is to develop new personalized therapies based on patient-and-tumor-specific mutations. Kurzrock said in a statement that the new funding "jump starts our initiative, starting with molecular profiling of cancer tumors, and gets is started in a very quick way."

Irwin Jacobs was a founding faculty member of UCSD, where he was a professor of engineering from 1966 to 1972. He is a co-founder and former chairman of Qualcomm, a semiconductor technologies firm based in San Diego.

The Jacobs family previously gave UCSD $75 million to establish the Jacobs Medical Center, and $110 million to the Jacobs School of Engineering.

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