Life Raft funds 10 research projects

After many months of work assembling a world-class research team, creating the first strategic research plan for GIST and building a grants infrastructure, the first round of Life Raft Group grants have been awarded.

The framework will allow for unprecedented collaboration between researchers. Team leaders will coordinate their projects across institutional and national boundaries.

Following sign-off by the Life Raft’s outside reviewers, initial two-year research grants have been awarded to Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, Oregon Health & Science University/Portland VA Research Foundation, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., and the University of Washington.

TISSUE BANKS CREATED

The Life Raft has created two tissue banks, one at Stanford University Medical Center for adult GIST, theother at Memorial Sloan-Kettering for pediatric GIST. A common protocol has been adopted for submitting tissue. Each of the principal investigators has agreed to participate in testing and annotating frozen tissue samples that will be collected by the appropriate tissue bank and distributed to each individual institution. An article by Dr. Jonathan Fletcher describing the 10 priority research projects begins on page 4. The research team members are on pages 6-7. The complete GIST Research Plan can soon be found on the Life Raft Website, www.liferaftgoup.org/research.html.