Atlanta (August 7, 2009) —The Integrative Cancer Research Center (ICRC) at the Georgia Institute of Technology is joining forces with the Center for Cancer Research and Therapeutic Development (CCRTD) at Clark Atlanta University (CAU) to establish a Collaborative Cancer Genomics Center (CCGC). The partnership will integrate expertise at both universities that will focus on understanding the underlying causes of prostate, ovarian, pancreatic and lung cancers.

John McDonald of Georgia Tech, Shafiq Khan of Clark Atlanta University and George Daneker of St. Joseph’s Hospital join forces to personalize cancer treatment. (Image courtesy: Clark Atlanta University)
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Shafiq Khan, director of Clark Atlanta’s CCRTD, said, “The molecular, bioinformatic and clinical expertise necessary to move forward with such a personalized cancer diagnosis and treatment program exists at the collaborating institutions. Establishment of CCGC will complement the existing experimental infrastructure necessary to generate the genomic data required to attain our goals.”

John McDonald, director Georgia Tech’s ICRC, added, “We are particularly interested in developing algorithms that will allow us to use gene expression and DNA sequence data that we gather from specific patients to generate a customized prognosis and optimal therapeutic treatment program for individual cancer patients.”

Under the collaborative agreement, CCRTD will house and operate the CCGC’s high-throughput next generation sequencing instruments. The resulting sequence data will be assembled and analyzed at ICRC. Patient samples will be provided by the Ovarian Cancer Institute (OCI) and Saint Joseph’s Hospital’s Translational Research Initiatives in Oncology for the Management of Personalized Healthcare (TRIOMPH ) program. Clark Atlanta and Georgia Tech scientists will join clinical experts from OCI and TRIOMPH to interpret and evaluate the resulting data.

Housed at CAU in the Thomas W. Cole Jr. Research Center for Science and Technology, the CCGC is scheduled to begin operation in the fall of 2009.

The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the nation's premier research universities. Ranked seventh among U.S. News & World Report's top public universities, Georgia Tech's more than 19,000 students are enrolled in its Colleges of Architecture, Computing, Engineering, Liberal Arts, Management and Sciences. Tech is among the nation's top producers of women and African-American engineers. The Institute offers research opportunities to both undergraduate and graduate students and is home to more than 100 interdisciplinary units plus the Georgia Tech Research Institute.