The Cancer Center at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center School of Medicine (TTUHSC SOM) was established in 2008 to provide a center of excellence for cancer research for the School of Medicine and the entire South Plains region.
A major focus of the TTUHSC SOM Cancer Center is conducting laboratory and clinical research that develops new anti-cancer drugs for both adults and children with difficult-to-treat cancers.
The Cancer Center hosts the Operations Center for a clinical consortium, the South Plains Oncology Consortium that conducts early phase clinical trials in adults and children with cancer.
The Cancer Center also hosts the Operations Center and laboratories for the Texas Cancer Cell Repository, a Cancer Prevention & Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT)-funded collaboration between a number of institutions to establish, bank, and distribute cancer cells from patients that have been established to grow in the laboratory or in special mice for use in studying the cancer biologies and novel therapies.
The TTUHSC SOM Cancer Center also hosts national resource laboratories that support clinical and translational research for childhood cancer:
- The Children's Oncology Group (COG) Cell Line and Xenograft Repository
- Neuroblastoma Pharmacology Resource Laboratory for the Children's Oncology Group and
- the New Approaches to Neuroblastoma Therapy consortium.
In the Spotlight
- April 2017: TTUHSC Cancer Center faculty member Dr. Barry Maurer was senior author on a paper in Clinical Cancer Research reporting results from a phase I trial of intravenous fenretinide in adults with hematological cancers. The paper documents remarkable activity of intravenous fenretinide in peripheral T cell lymphomas, with multiple sustained complete responses observed. The phase I study led to an ongoing phase II study of intravenous fenretinide in peripheral T cell lymphomas. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28420721
- December 2016: The Cancer Prevention & Research Institute (CPRIT) awarded 2 grants to TTUHSC Cancer Center Faculty. CPRIT awarded to Dr. Min Kang a $1,115,137 grant entitled OCT4/c-MYC axis as a mechanism of resistance to 13-cis retinoic acid in neuroblastoma. A $1,058,246 grant was awarded to Dr. C Patrick Reynolds entitled: Telomere Maintenance Mechanisms in Neuroblastoma.