The National Cancer Institute, the nation’s top cancer research organization, has renewed the Cancer Therapy & Research Center (CTRC) at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio as one of its NCI-designated Cancer Centers for three years. The distinction comes with $5.4 million in new federal funding through 2012 to sustain and grow the cancer center’s rapidly expanding research programs, now consisting of 140 scientists at work on a multitude of cancer projects.
“Keeping the words ‘NCI-designated Cancer Center’ next to our name is the Good Housekeeping seal of approval from the NCI,” said Tyler Curiel, M.D., M.P.H., executive director of the CTRC at the UT Health Science Center and an internationally known ovarian cancer researcher. “We are enormously proud that the quality of our programs has merited this highly competitive designation without interruption since 1991.”
The successful renewal follows a rigorous -ten month scientific and administrative evaluation of CTRC programs by a 16-member NCI-appointed review panel made up of directors and scientists from top cancer centers around the country.
“San Antonio and South Texas patients are the winners today, because an NCI-designated Cancer Center gives patients access to the latest, best and potentially most effective drugs and clinical trials to treat their disease,” said William L. Henrich, M.D., M.A.C.P., president of the Health Science Center. “The close association with the NCI allows NCI-designated Cancer Centers access to information and discoveries, including a pipeline of new treatment possibilities. That’s why patients travel long distances to receive care here.”
Texas has three NCI-designated Cancer Centers. The CTRC is the only one in South Texas and serves 4.4 million people in the high-growth corridor of Central and South Texas that includes Austin, San Antonio, Laredo and the Rio Grande Valley. The other two are in Houston: the U.T. M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and the Dan L. Duncan Cancer Center at Baylor.
Besides driving cancer research, an NCI-designated Cancer Center is an engine for regional economic growth, said Henry Cisneros, chairman of the executive committee of BioMed SA, a non-profit organization that promotes San Antonio as a city of science and health. “This designation, with its funding, is an indication of San Antonio’s strength as a biomedical hub and its increasing prominence in the nation’s health care and science industry,” he said.
But the impact of NCI designation is greatest on the patients who depend on the CTRC for the best available treatment and access to clinical trials.
Elizabeth Boyer, 52, from San Antonio, has advanced, metastatic ovarian cancer that resisted all standard therapies. She was referred to Dr. Curiel at the CTRC, where she agreed to enroll in a clinical trial of a novel immunotherapy for cancer. Boyer agreed to become the first patient to try this treatment after seeing its very promising response rates in mice. Today Boyer’s cancer is stable and she is enjoying a new granddaughter whom she thought she might never see.
“I’m alive today because CTRC gave me the chance to try something new — and it worked,” Boyer said.
The CTRC also offers many other investigational treatments for a variety of cancers. Many such treatments promise to be more selective in targeting cancer cells while causing less damage to healthy tissue. CTRC investigators are leaders in developing many of these new classes of treatments. For example, Susan Mooberry, Ph.D., studies natural products for leads and has found an agent that might work when standard treatments fail. LuZhe Sun, Ph.D., and colleagues have identified drugs that block critical growth signal pathways in cancer cells.