Mission

The mission of TRP is to integrate scientific advancements in the understanding of the biology of human cancer with the development of new interventions for the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer patients or populations at risk for cancer. TRP's mission is accomplished by fostering broad interdisciplinary investigations that focus on bringing discoveries from the laboratory to the clinic and coordinating the resources of NCI with those of academia, industry, and nonprofit organizations and foundations to reduce cancer incidence, morbidity, and mortality; to extend survival; and to increase the quality of life of cancer patients.

To that end, TRP engages in the following activities and initiatives:

• Planning, advising, coordinating, evaluating, and supporting the SPOREs, which use the P50/U54 grant funding mechanism, to translate novel scientific discoveries from the laboratory and/or population studies to the clinic for testing in humans with cancer, to determine the biological basis for clinical observations, and to use specimens from clinical studies to determine correlations between biomarkers and outcomes in patients
• Encouraging and facilitating collaborations among the SPOREs, Cancer Centers, other NCI- and NIH-funded mechanisms and programs, other government organizations, and outside organizations to increase cross-fertilization of ideas, leverage resources, reduce duplication, and ensure access of resources to projects and investigators
• Maintaining the Developmental Research Program and the Career Enhancement Program of the SPOREs to promote high-risk and/or high-payoff projects and to ensure the development of promising researchers who are new to translational research
• Supporting research in high-incidence cancers as well as rare cancers
• Collaborating with the advocacy community who supports translational science in cancer