Helen F. Graham Cancer Center & Research Institute and The Wistar Institute partner to expand research

To accelerate breakthrough cancer research in the human genome, the Gene Editing Institute at Christiana Care’s Helen F. Graham Cancer Center & Research Institute has entered into an agreement with The Wistar Institute. The agreement expands the historic partnership between the Graham Cancer Center, one of the nation’s largest community cancer centers, and Wistar, the nation’s first National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center dedicated solely to biomedical research.

In this partnership, the Gene Editing Institute will be integrated into Wistar’s Molecular Screening Facility, which will allow its innovative gene editing technologies to be made available to research projects at Wistar and to external users. The Gene Editing Institute will retain its management structure and will remain located at the Graham Cancer Center on the Christiana Hospital Campus in Newark, Del. The Molecular Screening Facility will remain housed at Wistar in Philadelphia.

“Bringing together scientists from the Gene Editing Institute and Wistar promises to be a catalyst that will speed progress in personalized medicine for cancer and other diseases,” said Nicholas J. Petrelli, M.D., the Bank of America endowed medical director of the Helen F. Graham Cancer Center & Research Institute at Christiana Care Health System.

This latest agreement enhances the bold research partnership between the Graham Cancer Center, an NCI Community Oncology Research Program (NCORP) and one of the first NCI-selected community cancer centers, and The Wistar Institute, the nation’s first NCI-designated research center solely devoted to cancer biology research. The NCI has called the historic partnership “extraordinary and innovative.”

The partnership, established in 2011, is the first-ever inter-institutional affiliation between an NCI-designated basic research institution and a community cancer center. This pairing has created unique opportunities for collaboration in cancer research, bringing together for the first time basic and translational investigators with dedicated community oncologists.

Together, Graham Cancer Center clinicians and scientists at Wistar are collaborating on research projects targeting ovarian cancer, breast cancer and more, in addition to studies on lung cancer and melanoma.