community | Tissue Microenvironment (TiME) Training Program

DIRECTOR’S NOTE WINTER 2018

The Cancer Center at Illinois (CCIL) has come a long way since we started coming together as a small “Cancer Community” in 2011. Our membership has grown, we have developed strong educational programs to enhance training for tomorrow’s scientists, and our clinical partnerships continue to thrive. Together, these efforts have led to the elevation of the CCIL as the 8th campuswide research institute at Illinois, demonstrating the university’s commitment to cancer research and education.

Our members are at the heart of this evolution. From Shiva Abbaszadeh’s design of an imaging scanner for head and neck cancer patients to Pablo Perez-Pinera’s genetic research, CCIL members are creating singular approaches to understanding and fighting cancer. Our research excellence is reinforced by national recognition, and I especially congratulate both John Katzenellenbogen for the Outstanding Achievement in Chemistry in Cancer Research award from the American Association for Cancer Research and Paul Hergenrother for the George and Christine Sosnovsky Award for Cancer Research from the American Chemical Society.

Our new Seed Funding Program will support even more innovation and discovery. These pilot projects will encourage new collaborations, unique research, and external funding, ultimately boosting Illinois research teams in developing novel approaches to fighting cancer.

Our educational efforts continue to evolve as we train the next generation of cancer scholars. The TiMe program has selected its new cohort of graduate student researchers, and these 12 exceptional scholars reflect the breadth of Illinois’ cancer research interests. We’ve also recruited our largest cohort of undergraduate Cancer Scholars and our high school program, researcHStart, expanded to eight students this year.

Many thanks for your continued engagement and support! Exciting times are ahead as we prepare for NCI designation, and I hope you continue with us on this journey.

DIRECTOR’S NOTE SUMMER 2018

With the end of the spring semester, we have entered into the “construction semester” on the Urbana-Champaign campus! Work crews seem to appear without warning, and the new growth seems to be on every university street and sidewalk. It’s all part of a bigger plan to improve the community and strengthen the infrastructure that supports our research, teaching, public engagement, and economic development missions.

In similar ways, the Cancer Center is under construction! We are deliberately putting infrastructure in place to connect our research community in new and exciting ways, building bridges among faculty, staff, students, physicians, and community partners to tackle the basic science and engineering questions that surround cancer.

When we “officially” established the Cancer Center at Illinois last July, we also laid out an ambitious plan to become designated by the NIH’s National Cancer Institute as the first new Basic Science Designated Cancer Center in nearly 30 years. Our first step in that process was preparation of a preliminary draft of a cancer center support grant (CCSG), which we shared with our External Advisory Committee last October. Our distinguished members of the EAC put in significant effort to strengthen our center and helped improve our application. I am deeply grateful for the quick work (and enthusiastic support) from our campus leadership — Chancellor Jones, Provost Cangellaris, and Interim Vice Chancellor for Research Martinis — in supporting the recommendations of the EAC and enabling amazing progress for the center. I am more confident than ever that we have the exceptional faculty and students, a great center team, institutional support, and the resources we need to be successful in building a truly unique and impactful Cancer Center.

While, as a researcher, I am delighted that we are making such significant progress, as an educator I am equally excited about our student programs. Our first cohort of Cancer Scholars graduated in May 2018, and our first group (2016-2018) of NIH-funded Tumor Microenvironment Training Fellows will wrap up their time with the program in August, making room for a new group to start their journey in the fall semester. We welcomed a new cohort of researcHStart students this summer, and added to the CHSTAR program. This cycle of growth and change — deliberately constructing opportunities for innovation, discovery, and learning — is a hallmark of the Cancer Center at Illinois.

DIRECTOR’S NOTE FALL 2017

Greetings! Since my last note, there have been some big changes. First, our Cancer Community at Illinois officially became the Cancer Center of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign! Kudos to all our faculty, staff and students who have worked so hard to realize what was merely a concept just a few years ago.

In this issue, we highlight many of the scientific leaders of our Cancer Center. I would especially like to recognize the service of our Steering Committee (below) and especially our Chair, Prof. Gaskins, in guiding and forming this center. A big thank you to our former steering committee members Profs. Milan Bagchi, Benita Katzenellenbogen, William O’Brien and Edward Roy.

We also gratefully acknowledge the support provided by the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute at Illinois and Director Neal Cohen, the Beckman Institute and Director Jeff Moore, the College of Engineering and Dean Andreas Cangellaris, and the Department of Bioengineering, with heads Profs. Michael Insana and Rashid Bashir. And we applaud our Deputy Director, Dean King Li of the College of Medicine, for his visionary leadership of the college, as well as contributions to establishing the Cancer Center. The Cancer Center is truly a result of the entire campus contributing its efforts.

We are truly meeting a goal of navigating new waters. Building on Illinois’ strengths in cancer research, we seek to become a unique NCI-designated “basic science” cancer center focusing on technology and translation of scientific innovations. Toward this goal, our campus solicited the assistance of a panel of national leaders in cancer research. They visited in October as our inaugural External Advisory Committee. I am grateful to Chancellor Robert Jones, Vice Chancellor Susan Martinis, and over 100 of our faculty, staff and students who worked to make this visit a success. We are also delighted to have such a distinguished committee and look forward to building our center with their advice.

I would also like to highlight the successes of our faculty and students within the past few months. Several distinguished faculty have joined the University and Cancer Center; and new students have brought new energy to our campus. The University continues to power ahead with its contributions towards eliminating the burden of cancer with impactful research and innovative educational programs. The past few months have seen progress not only in our center but also in our shared vision of Illinois’ strides in nutrition, behavioral sciences, basic sciences and engineering being used to serve local, national, and global audiences.

DIRECTOR’S NOTE SPRING 2017

To the Cancer Community at Illinois – our faculty, staff, undergraduate and graduate students, student groups, external partners, and community members and other supporters, THANK YOU for a wonderful year. We should be very pleased as, together, we have accomplished much this academic year. I look forward to us working together in future community activities to take cancer research and education to an even higher level at Illinois.

The achievements and developments from this year are noteworthy. Each year, we continue to welcome new faculty and staff members to our community. Our annual community meeting that was held in October provided a progress report and outlined plans for the future. Many thanks to the speakers for your continued engagement and support. Our researchers won kudos for exceptional studies, were awarded many prestigious awards and provided exciting advances that can change cancer care and lives in the future. Together, our faculty were awarded national centers and initiated many exciting new studies.

I would like to once again recognize the generous support of Ira and Debra Cohen and collaborations with the University of Chicago and University of Illinois at Chicago for the researcHStart program. Thank you to Carle Foundation Hospital for their support of the C STAR program which is making excellent progress. The Mayo Clinic & Illinois Alliance continues to be strong and multiple studies with our partners at UIC are ongoing. Finally, the exciting new college of medicine at the University formulated a curriculum and selected a new Dean, Prof. King Li, who is a distinguished cancer researcher.

Exciting times indeed for our community! We are all eagerly looking forward to what lies ahead for us.

DIRECTOR’S NOTE SPRING 2016

I am pleased to inform you that campus has re-affirmed its commitment to making our community successful after a review in 2015. In particular, I appreciate the support provided by the IHSI, my home department of Bioengineering, and the College of Engineering in helping us continue our work. It is a special pleasure for our community to have Dr. Margaret Browne Huntt continue in her role of supporting and nurturing our efforts.

Another academic year has passed and our community continues to innovate and expand. Our faculty ranks grow with innovative new investigators. This year, for example, we welcome Dr. Anna Arthur who is a joint University-Carle hire in the area of cancer nutrition. Our community members continue to excel in conducting notable studies, obtaining federal grants and receiving various awards. Our first cohort of Cancer Scholars for Translational and Applied Research (C*STAR) students was extremely successful, and took advantage of the opportunity to interact with our Carle partners within the clinical setting. We are a community of students (high school, undergraduate, graduate and postdocs), staff, faculty, and community members.

This year, the Cancer Community at Illinois also launched an advocacy group geared toward bringing in patients and caregivers to inform cancer research on campus. I particularly appreciate the efforts of professors Zeynep Madak-Erdogan, Food Science and Human Nutrition, and Erik Nelson, Molecular and Integrative Physiology, in this regard. In addition to launching their own research laboratories, they have worked tirelessly for the community.

We have much to look forward to in the upcoming year. We will continue to expand our educational programs, the researcHStart high school program; the undergraduate Cancer Scholars Program, and the graduate the Cancer Scholars for Translational and Applied Research (C STAR) program. A new NIH-supported training program, the tissue microenvironment training program, will bring more students into our community and help our faculty collaborate more effectively in this area.

While the past few years have seen us establish and grow, over the next few weeks, we will be soliciting ideas from the community regarding areas of research interests. In the fall, we plan to have meetings and workshops with you—our community and partners—to hear from you in real-time, but also to keep you abreast of our collective activities.

The 2016-17 academic year will be an exciting one for our community and we hope you will join us on this continued journey.

– Rohit Bhargava