Cancer treatment partnership with UC Davis, NCI
Many promising cancer treatments reach early clinical testing in humans, but only a very small percentage pass that stage and go on to benefit patients. A new partnership between The Jackson Laboratory, the UC Davis Cancer Center and the National Cancer Institute's Center for Advanced Preclinical Research (CAPR) is seeking to improve those odds.
The collaboration seeks to establish a uniform and controlled testing process to integrate data from mouse cancer model studies with patient clinical trial studies. The approach will help identify biomarkers, molecules that provide targets for candidate drugs and help predict when they will be most effective.
"There is an urgent need for more predictive models of human cancer for drug discovery," said Charles Hewett, Ph.D., executive vice president and COO of The Jackson Laboratory. "Unfortunately, nine out of 10 cancer drugs entering preclinical testing fail. This comes at great cost to the pharmaceutical industry and to patients. The integrated approach we have with CAPR and UC Davis targets these issues directly."