Medical College receives $3 million National Cancer Institute grant

[PRESS RELEASE]

Milwaukee, Wis. - The Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee has received a five-year, $3,082,752 renewal grant from the National Cancer Institute to continue to develop the College's Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research (CIBMTR) as a unique world resource of data and statistical expertise for the scientific community. The CIBMTR research program is an affiliation between the Medical College and the National Marrow Donor Program, the U.S. donor registry.

Mary M. Horowitz, M.D., the Robert A. Uihlein, Jr. Professor in Hematologic Research and director and professor of medicine in the division of neoplastic diseases and related disorders, is principal investigator for the grant.

The CIBMTR is recognized as an international resource for data on the transplantation of blood stem cells derived from the bone marrow or blood - known as hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) - that has led to successful completion of hundreds of research studies. It includes data from more than 400 transplant centers that share data on HCT outcomes, and a statistical center that maintains a clinical database with information on more than 250,000 HCT recipients. The grant will carry the CIBMTR into its fifteenth year of funding.

Dr. Horowitz's team will work to develop electronic data acquisition technology to include participation by a wide range of U.S. and non-U.S. HCT centers, and collaborate with domestic and international organizations to increase the data available to study for new HCT technologies. The grant will also facilitate collection of data on outcomes of other therapeutic applications of hematopoietic stem cells, and develop new biostatistical methodology to address the challenges, needs and opportunities in analyzing HCT outcomes.