WEST LAFAYETTE – Purdue University’s Oncological Sciences Center and Indiana University will share a National Institutes of Health grant to launch a cancer advocacy network and advance research for systems-engineering principles to cancer prevention and treatment.
The $500,000 grant will be used through the joint Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute. It will fund a partnership between researchers in a Purdue and Indiana cancer care engineering program.
“Our goal through this program is to recruit 20 people who will become advocates, the foot soldiers to help educate and recruit clinical trial participants for discovery research,” said Marietta Harrison, a medicinal chemistry and pharmacology professor at Purdue.
She said the key to conquering cancer is early detection, which will be the focus of the Cancer Care Engineering project. Also participating in the project is the Bindley Bioscience Center, Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering and the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing, along with collaborators from the IU Melvin and Bren Simon Cancer Center, IU Health Arnett, Regenstrief Institute/Indiana University Center for the Health Services & Outcomes Research and the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
The Walther Cancer Foundation, Regenstrief Foundation in Indianapolis and the U.S. Department of Defense have provided nearly $5 million in funding since researchers in Purdue’s Discover Park launched the Cancer Care Engineering Project in 2006.
