G. Thompson Hutton, the Trustee of the Geoffrey Beene Foundation and President of Geoffrey Beene, LLC, has orchestrated the activities to build and support this ambitious research initiative. “The hallmark of the GEOFFREY BEENE CANCER RESEARCH CENTER AT MEMORIAL SLOAN-KETTERING CANCER CENTER is its focus on revolutionary new research approaches across a variety of cancers, strategies that will lead to prevention through improved diagnostics and enhanced quality of life treatments toward the ultimate goal of making cancer a more manageable and perhaps one day, a curable disease.”

Since its creation, the Geoffrey Beene Cancer Research Center has served as the focal point for an array of projects, aimed at translating works at the cellular level into revolutionary new research approaches to preventing, diagnosing, and treating the disease. It brings together researchers and physicians from two complementary areas: the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program, based in the Sloan-Kettering Institute (SKI), which studies the genetic and biochemical events that trigger the transformation of normal cells into cancerous ones, and the Memorial Hospital-based Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program, which pursues new insights into the molecular mechanisms of cancer from the perspective of clinical oncology.

“The Geoffrey Beene Cancer Research Center has helped galvanize our efforts to gain new insights into cancer and to apply that knowledge to the development of more effective strategies for patient care,” said Harold Varmus, President of MSKCC. “We are especially grateful to Tom Hutton and his colleagues at Geoffrey Beene, LLC for recognizing the significance of the work being done here.”

The funds from Geoffrey Beene support advanced new research initiatives spanning the entire range of translational research, funding core research labs, the establishment of senior and junior faculty chairs, graduate fellowships, and the annual Geoffrey Beene Symposium.

The Center provides support for the Geoffrey Beene Translational Oncology Core, directed by Dr. Charles Sawyers. The core performs genomic analyses of clinical material by applying state of the art genome-scale molecular profiling technologies.

The Center also provides support for the Microchemistry and Proteomics Core Facility and Genomics Core Facility aimed at significantly augmenting Memorial Sloan-Kettering’s capacity for translational cancer research in genomics.

Nine research grants were funded in the first year of the Geoffrey Beene Cancer Research Center. In 2008 an additional ten research grants were funded as well as three proposals for shared resources.

Since the inception of the Center, Johanna Joyce, PhD, and Andrea Ventura, MD/PhD, Assistant Members in the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program, and Ross Levine, MD, Assistant Member in the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program, have been appointed Geoffrey Beene Junior Faculty Chairs. Hyung-Song Nam, an MD/PhD student, and Sindy Escobar-Alvarez, a PhD student, were named the first Geoffrey Beene graduate fellows in 2007. The second Geoffrey Beene Graduate Fellowships in 2008 were awarded to two PhD students, Vasilena Gocheva and Barry S. Taylor.”

Oversight of the Geoffrey Beene Cancer Research Center is provided by the following members of its Executive Committee: