Brain Cancer

This SPORE grant is intended to support multi-project, interdisciplinary, and multi-institutional translational research in glioma. The governance structure of this Harvard Cancer Consortium (HCC) SPORE grant provides the foundation for the implementation, execution, and ultimate success of all the projects and cores. The Administration Core serves as the “hub” for this governance structure and aims to achieve a number of specific objectives.

We will execute a plan that provides experienced, centralized program leadership and administration. The Glioma SPORE Director and Co-Director are senior administrators, institutional leaders, and researchers who have worked together on the current funding period for this SPORE and prior HCC initiatives. They consequently provide consistent, strong, complementary leadership for the grant. The trans-institutional administrative team consists of senior personnel at HCC institutions who have worked together effectively in the current funding period of this grant.

We maintain two senior clinical and imaging scientists in the Administration Core who supervise Glioma SPORE-specific clinical trials and Glioma SPORE-specific imaging studies, respectively. These scientists enable this Glioma SPORE to capitalize on existing HCC P30 Cores to support these types of studies.

An effective internal and external committee structure provides multidisciplinary expertise, advice, and program oversight. These committees consist of collaborative members who have worked together on the current and previous SPORE projects. Regular Glioma SPORE meetings with both administrative and scientific personnel will continue to facilitate collaboration, troubleshooting, and monitoring of the SPORE program.

This Glioma SPORE requires statistical and bioinformatics collaboration on various research, ranging from pre-clinical models to human studies. The Biostatistics Core mission of this glioma SPORE is to foster rigor and reproducibility. Towards this end, the core will work with project leaders to ensure statistical integrity in the design of their experiments and interpretation of their data. The Biostatistics Core will function as a scientific hub to facilitate inter-and intra- SPORE collaborations between all Projects and the Pathology Core. The core will advise on all issues related to data collection, analysis, and interpretation.

The goal of the Pathology Core is to collect, profile, and distribute human glioma tissues, patient-derived xenografts, and cell lines for the research projects of this SPORE. In addition, the Core will provide centralized expert neuropathology and genomic analysis and clinical trial support to all projects. As such, the Pathology Core services are essential for the success of the SPORE. In addition to its biorepository and service functions, the Core will strive to improve its services by developing emerging tissue technologies. This Core will facilitate and ensure the safe and effective use of finite, clinically annotated glioma tissue resources. It will aid in the prioritization of resource utilization across collaborative translational research at Harvard Cancer Consortium (HCC) institutions and other SPORE programs.