Technology Transfer

The Office of Research and Development Alliances supports the mission of Fox Chase Cancer Center to accelerate the integration of emerging technologies into team-based science to reduce the burden of cancer in all individuals by facilitating relationships with industry in order to translate clinical and basic research findings into products and services for the public good.

With annual research expenditures that approximate $100 million, Fox Chase Cancer Center is one of the leading freestanding cancer research and treatments centers in the United States.

Industrial collaborations with researchers at Fox Chase provide a myriad of benefits for both partners.

Technology Licensing fulfills our obligation to make scientific discoveries available for the public good while generating income for our research, educational, and cancer treatment programs. A company gains the opportunity to interact with Fox Chase's world class scientists and clinicians while reducing its internal costs of research and development. Fox Chase offers several avenues for collaborating with industrial partners to develop our technologies.

Fox Chase is poised to work with potential partners to form new businesses around a platform technology or group of technologies. Our past efforts in this realm have been successful, and we are enthusiastic about this mode of transferring technology to the marketplace, Learn More.

Institute for Personalized Medicine

Decades of experience and research in cancer care tells us that no two cancers are alike: some respond well to a particular therapy, while others, seemingly identical, do no respond at all. One reason for this discrepancy is that tumors, especially solid tumors, accumulate particular sets of mutations in many genes, and that these genes sets differ among individual patients. However, we now have the ability to determine genetic information in such tumors, and to act on this information when considering therapies. In this way, we hope to make the "one-size-fits-all" approach to cancer therapy a thing of the past.

In an effort to improve treatment of patients with cancer, Fox Chase Cancer Center has initiated a new program in which we aim to determine the genetic lesions that characterize tumors in living patients: The Institute for Personalized Medicine.

The immediate objective of the Institute is to sequence exons from genes known to impact key, targetable, signaling pathways in patients with metastatic disease.

Our vision is one in which at the time of diagnosis and again at disease progression, a patient's cancer will be sequenced either for selected genes of interest or the entire genome. The resultant information will be housed in a searchable database, thereby allowing patients to be matched to particular drugs based upon mechanism of action, regardless of the phase of clinical trial. Updated eligibility criteria will no longer state the requirement for a given disease but instead will articulate a far more sophisticated paradigm focusing on pathway activation, gene amplification, gene mutation, or combinations thereof.