NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The Cancer Research and Prevention Institute of Texas has awarded $20 million to Rice University and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center to create a pre-commercialization center to help commercialize new diagnostics products and treatments for cancer.
The center will be located at Rice University's BioScience Research Collaborative (BRC) and will connect researchers from Rice and partner Texas Medical Center institutions and entrepreneurs with funding and management experts, Rice said.
The center will be operated by the Houston-Area Translation Research Consortium (HATRC) in collaboration with the new Institute for Applied Cancer Science (IACS) at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
It is unclear what new technologies will be evaluated by the new center, and a university administrator said through a spokesman only that HATRC "is charged with reviewing all of these technology classes that are generated in the Houston area."
Cindy Farach-Carson, Rice's vice provost for translational bioscience and scientific director of the BRC, said in a statement IACS "will bring together the drug discovery, personalized medicine, clinical trials, and patient access and data from the largest cancer center in the world to the mission of accelerating translation and driving development of new cancer medicines."