CLINICAL ONCOLOGY RESEARCH TRAINING

The faculty of the Arizona Cancer Center will establish a Clinical
Oncology Research Training Program. The objective of this program is to
train physicians in laboratory-based clinical research. The trainees
will develop expertise in a cancer-related laboratory discipline, use it
to ask clinically relevant questions and through it, develop clinical
research programs in cancer diagnosis, prevention and therapy.
Successful candidates for the program will have junior faculty
appointments in one of the Departments of Gynecology, Internal Medicine,
Pathology, Radiation Oncology or Surgery and will devote at least 75% of
their time to the research training. Twenty-two core faculty and 21
support faculty with peer reviewed research funding, will participate in
the training program and make their time, expertise and facilities
available to the trainees. The training program will be directed and
supervised by an advisory committee consisting of the relevant
departmental chairs and program leaders and an education subcommittee.
The trainees will undergo an initial six month period of orientation,
laboratory experiences and preliminary studies prior to the
identification and approval of a research program and a mentor faculty.
Subsequently, the clinical research program will be conducted and will be
monitored by periodic reviews of both written and orally presented data.
Didactic courses as well as formal and informal seminar series will be
utilized to round out the training of the selected faculty. The Arizona
Cancer Center is uniquely qualified to conduct this training program
because of its several multidisciplinary program project grants, its
intense network of multidisciplinary collaborative studies, its major
orientation which is to translate basic and laboratory observations into
clinical therapeutic modalities and its track record of training
oncologists who have subsequently entered careers In academic clinical
research. The highly developed cancer prevention, epidemiology and
biometry programs of the Arizona Cancer Center will also contribute
greatly to this program. The anticipated outcome is the training of a
cadre of physicians capable of playing a leadership role in developmental
clinical oncology research.