In addition to educating medical professionals and providing excellent health care Texas Tech University Health Science Center's mission statement includes "advancing knowledge through innovative research". This CPRIT grant application is focused on updating and modernizing the infrastructure at TTUHSC so that our cancer researchers have state of the art equipment and facilities to carry out the important work of understanding the mechanisms of cancer as a disease and to investigate and develop treatments for specific adult and childhood cancers. To fully realize the potential of cancer research laboratories at TTUHSC, including a national repository for childhood cancer, a facili...

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In addition to educating medical professionals and providing excellent health care Texas Tech University Health Science Center's mission statement includes "advancing knowledge through innovative research". This CPRIT grant application is focused on updating and modernizing the infrastructure at TTUHSC so that our cancer researchers have state of the art equipment and facilities to carry out the important work of understanding the mechanisms of cancer as a disease and to investigate and develop treatments for specific adult and childhood cancers. To fully realize the potential of cancer research laboratories at TTUHSC, including a national repository for childhood cancer, a facility dedicated specifically for animal models of cancer is required. The creation of a core facility at TTUHSC will enhance and improve ongoing research projects and facilitate collaborations between the Lubbock, Amarillo, and Abilene campuses. This grant application seeks to support such a facility so as to provide a state-of-art animal facility for the housing, care, and maintenance of special mice that lack an immune system and can grow human tumors used in cancer research. The core will provide imaging to enable investigators to detect and characterize human tumors growing in the special mice and instruments for measuring changes in the blood of the mice from testing experimental anti-cancer drugs. The requested core will support many TTUHSC cancer research labs working on cancer biology and cancer drug testing and will also support a national resource laboratory located at TTUHSC Lubbock, the Children’s Oncology Group (COG) and Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation Childhood Cancer Repository (www.COGcell.org), which provides models of childhood cancer to investigators in 26 countries, including 70 investigators from 11 Texas academic institutions. Thus, this core supports a number of CPRIT goals, including the priority CPRIT has placed on childhood cancer research.

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