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 scientific focus of the center will be to identify genetic and epigenetic factors coupled to tumor initiation, progression, and response to therapy. A sub-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.
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. It will also provide a means for faculty at both UMass Boston and the DF/HCC to pursue expeditious and economical high-level genomics studies related to the research focus of the center.