Kentucky Cancer Experimental Therapeutics Program Scope Account for Black

Kentucky has developed major biomedical research centers at the University of Kentucky in Lexington and at the University of Louisville. These academic medical centers generate income from two major sources: from medical service provided by clinicians and from research grants obtained from basic scientists. The traditional separation of clinical and basic science activity in these medical centers is cultural and political, and it limits opportunities to deftly exploit advances in basic science for clinical benefit. We propose an initiative to unite basic scientists and clinicians at the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville in a coordinated effort to rapidly develop new treatments for cancer. This initiative, the Kentucky Cancer Experimental Therapeutics Program, will take existing expertise at both universities and provide the incentives, structure and additional expertise to rapidly bring novel cancer therapies to the clinic. This program would provide funding for overall leadership of the program, for the creation of core facilities required for clinical drug development, for the recruitment of scientists to Kentucky's universities who are developing novel cancer treatments, for the recruitment of clinician-scientists who can administer and assess experimental cancer treatments, and for the creation of a Kentucky Cancer Clinical Trials Network to allow qualified community-based oncologists to participate in certain trials of new therapies for cancer. The economic impact of this initiative will include: 1) development of intellectual property rights and licensing agreements to benefit Kentucky's universities; 2) the development of UK and UL spin-off companies for scientists able to take advantage of the considerable value added to their research by the Kentucky Cancer Experimental Therapeutics Program infrastructure; 3) increase in research grant funding to study the. mechanism of action of new cancer therapies; 4) increase in clinical income to medical centers as patients travel across state lines for novel therapies; 5) obtaining substantial federal funding as a result of achieving the designation as an NCI Comprehensive Cancer Center for both the Markey Cancer Center and the Brown Cancer Center; and 6) eventual application of the infrastructure created by this initiative to include novel therapies in non-malignant diseases.