Cancer Institute Chooses UCI as Site for Research Center

The National Cancer Institute has decided to locate one of eight new national research centers at UC Irvine. The center, to be operated by the university’s College of Medicine’s Epidemiology Division, will be the only one of its kind in California.

“UCI is proud to be selected,” Chancellor Ralph J. Cicerone said Monday in a written statement. “This new . . . center will become a potent force for new ideas and new strategies in the fight against cancer.”

The centers are designed to use emerging technologies and recent discoveries--including the Internet and other electronic media--to study the role that gene mutations play in human cancer.

Dr. Hoda Anton-Culver, chief of UCI’s Epidemiology Division, said that, by working as part of a network of similar centers at a time of “unprecedented scientific discoveries and reports of new methods to attack cancer at the genetic level, our center . . . will take advantage of those discoveries.”

UCI recently was awarded $6 million in grants by the cancer institute to set up two research databases to collect, analyze and disseminate information on hundreds of thousands of people nationwide who are genetically predisposed to cancer.