Center for Personalized Cancer Therapy

at the University of Massachusetts Boston

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:

  1. Foster and facilitate collaborative translational cancer research focused on human cancer diagnosis, prognosis, treatment, and response to therapy
  2. 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.