TRP 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. It focuses 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.

The TRP has three aims:

to reduce cancer incidence, morbidity, and mortality
to extend survival
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 Specialized Programs of Research Excellence (SPORE) programs. These 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. They also seek 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