The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) has awarded nearly half a million dollars to the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) for a collaborative research project that includes New York University (NYU), Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), and Providence Cancer Center.
The $492,000 award -- for the project "A New CTSA Partnership to Translate an Oral Cancer Biomarker from Lab to Clinic" -- is a competitive revision supplement to UCSF's five-year, $112 million Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) grant.
The aim of the award is to enhance collaborations among investigators from the 60-member CTSA program performing multidisciplinary projects in the area of bench-to-bedside translational research. UCSF, NYU, and OHSU are all part of the national CTSA consortium.
With the incidence of oral cancer on the rise, particularly among young people and women, this collaborative effort is focused on identifying oral cancer patients who are at low risk of cervical lymph node metastasis, and reducing the number of major surgeries to remove cervical lymph nodes, which are costly and inherently risky.
The research project includes the following:
- Development and validation of a noninvasive molecular assay for a biomarker of oral cancer metastasis that was originally identified at UCSF
- Development of a prototype Web-based clinical database to capture clinical information at the two clinical sites and track samples and assay results
