Announcement of the new Bay Area Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Center was made today (October 14) by the National Institutes of Health.

UCSF will serve as lead institution for the new Center in partnership with Kaiser Permanente of Northern California and Marin Breast Cancer Watch. Collaborative partners also include Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the California Department of Health Services, the San Francisco Department of Public Health, and the Marin County Department of Health and Human Services.

Robert Hiatt, MD, PhD, director for population sciences at the UCSF Comprehensive Cancer Center, will direct the new Center. Project leaders are Zena Werb, PhD, professor and vice chair of anatomy at UCSF; Lawrence Kushi, ScD, associate director, division of research at Kaiser; and Janice Barlow, RN, executive director of Marin Breast Cancer Watch.

Headquartered at UCSF, the new Center will be organized as a "center without walls" with research and community activities performed at several sites. It is one of four centers across the country funded through a new initiative of the NIH that will study the impact of prenatal-to-adult environmental exposures that may predispose women to breast cancer. The centers as a group are supported jointly by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Cancer Institute, both institutes of the NIH, at $5 million a year over seven years for a total of $35 million.

The other centers are at the University of Cincinnati; Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia; and Michigan State University in East Lansing. The four centers will network and interact as a single program, with some specialization at each center.

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Contact: Eve Harris
eharris@pubaff.ucsf.edu
415-885-7277
University of California - San Francisco
14-Oct-2003