Oxford University this week announced the establishment of the Precision Cancer Medicine Institute (PCMI) with an initial investment of over $175 million. This new institute will carry out research into advanced cancer diagnostic and therapeutic techniques, and is being funded in cooperation with several industry partners, including Roche Diagnostics and GE Healthcare. The focus for the PCMI will be on patients with early-stage cancers that currently have a poor prognosis, and proton beam technology will be a major area of therapeutic research.
Along with the establishment of the new institute, Oxford has also announced a research partnership with the California-based Chan Soon-Shiong Institute for Molecular Medicine, creating the Chan Soon-Shiong Oxford Centre for Molecular Medicine. The new centre will focus on using “large amounts of genomic and other molecular data” combined with clinical data to optimize cancer treatments. This new centre is likely to be housed within the PCMI where the “clinical applications of its research will take place.”
Patrick Soon-Shiong has committed $50 million to the new centre, and in his statement announcing the partnership said that a portion of this commitment will be used to fund infrastructure that will ensure nationwide (U.K.) access to the genomic platform being created at Oxford.
Here is a link to the announcement.