The establishment of the Institute for Applied Cancer Science at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center was announced on November 28 by Ronald DePinho, MD, president of MD Anderson, other Institute leaders, Governor Rick Perry, and the Chairman of the U. Texas System Board of Regents, Gene Powell.

The Institute was established to combine the best of academic research and industry research and development to effectively move discoveries through the R&D process into human testing in clinical trials. Other leaders of the Institute have been drawn from industry and academics with experience in bridging both and in driving research through the R&D pipeline.

Giulio Draetta, MD, PhD is the Director, and Lynda Chin, MD, is the Scientific Director of the institute. Both were former leaders of the Belfer Institute for Applied Cancer Science at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

As Scientific Director at the Belfer, Chin drove the scientific foundation for collaborations with pharmaceutical companies (Merck and Sanofi-Aventis).  She is a leader of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) of NIH and chairs the TCGA glioblastoma working group as well as the melanoma group.  She is also an entrepreneur and founder of two biotechnology companies.  At MD Anderson She is also the Chair of the new Department of Genomic Medicine.

Prior to his work at the Belfer Institute, Dr. Draetta held leadership positions in pharmaceutical companies, Pharmacia and Merck as vice president and worldwide head of oncology drug discovery.  He also had a highly productive academic research career and is the founder of a biotechnology company focused on cancer therapies.

Both Dr. Draetta and Dr. Chin have been speakers at National Brain Tumor Society organized symposia, "Driving Research to Therapies" and "Stepping Up to the Complexity Challenge: The Systems Biology Era of Cancer Research", respectively.