The Wistar Institute is one of only seven NCI-designated basic cancer centers in the country. Unlike the research institutes affiliated with a university or medical center, Wistar as a standalone, independent organization doesn’t have its own patient base, has no direct access to samples and specimens, and must partner with clinicians and health systems to bring its discoveries to the patient bedside.

However, our relatively small and flat organizational structure, by design, gives our community of scientists the ultimate agility and freedom to collaborate with partner organizations. This flexibility, paired with the Institute’s technological capabilities, is a significant draw for like-minded academic clinicians.

With funds raised from the Bold Science // Global Impact Campaign, Wistar will establish a Clinical Collaboration Fund to establish and nurture our growing partnerships with local, national and international clinicians and health systems. Designed as a continuing opportunity for donor support for years to come, the Clinical Collaboration Fund will immediately begin serving as a flexible resource for the Institute, helping to:

• Support access to patient data, samples and specimens needed to advance Wistar research projects.
• Secure the protected time of academic clinician partners for their participation in investigator-initiated clinical trials.
• Provide supplemental resources to expand patient cohorts in ongoing Wistar clinical trials.
• Fill gaps in grant funding associated with Wistar clinical trials.

Since its inception, The Wistar Science Discovery Fund has functioned as a highly successful internal accelerator program, vastly exceeding its original goals. It has acted as a dramatic multiplier of our research efforts: underwriting novel, early-stage research projects to reach a better understanding of the science, while creating the ideal conditions for our scientists to obtain larger, more impactful grants to further their research.

To external industry partners – who are key funders in the translation of discoveries into therapies – this type of research is often considered too financially risky to develop and advance to the stage where a therapy can developed, trialed and eventually brought to patients.

By expanding the Wistar Science Discovery Fund, we aim to address this lack of funding and expand the Institute’s bench-to-bedside translational ecosystem by providing the resources to make a laboratory discovery a potential clinical candidate in cancer and infectious diseases. Wistar will work in partnership with Contract Research Organizations to validate key milestones in the drug development process, such as safety, tolerability, druglike properties and identification of likely responders in the clinic. The ultimate goal is to support all the regulatory and validation steps necessary to receive approval from the US Food and Drug Administration to conduct a phase I clinical trial of the new Wistar technology.