About Us
The Center for Personalized Cancer Therapy (CPCT) is joint program of the University of Massachusetts Boston and the Dana Farber/Harvard Cancer Center (DF/HCC).
The goals of the center are to:
- Foster and facilitate collaborative translational cancer research focused on human cancer diagnosis, prognosis, treatment, and response to therapy
- Translate laboratory-based discoveries into clinical practice that will identify and implement individualized therapeutic choices to successfully eliminate human tumor progression and recurrence.
The CPCT will provide a means for undergraduate and graduate students to become the next generation of well-trained biomedical workforce talent and the future leaders of life sciences research in academia and industry.
A Core function of the CPCT will be to establish a monoclonal Ab core focused on the development of antibodies that successfully identify signaling molecules (e.g, phospho-proteins, acetylated proteins) coupled to cancer diagnosis, prognosis, and response to therapy. Moreover, these antibodies will be vetted using fixed, paraffin-embedded tissues to ensure optimal utility as histopathologic reagents. An end-goal is commercialization of these antibodies for clinical use.
A scientific focus of the center will be to elucidate how lifestyle choices, particularly those that promote diet-induced obesity and type 2 diabetes mellitus (‘diabesity’), modulate the tumor microenvironment, and how such modulation affects tumor initiation, progression, and response to therapy.