A new venture is uniting cancer researchers from four Minnesota institutions to tackle chemoprevention strategies.

Stephen Hecht, Ph.D.

Established in 2007, the Minnesota Chemoprevention Consortium (MC² or "MC-squared") brings together researchers from the University of Minnesota, Mayo Clinic, Hormel Institute, and Hormel Foods to facilitate and implement interdisciplinary chemopreventive agent development and delivery for cancer prevention. The consortium meets regularly and involves researchers from a wide range of disciplines, including the basic sciences, epidemiology, agriculture, and food science.

Stephen Hecht, Ph.D., leader of the Cancer Center's Carcinogenesis and Chemoprevention Research Program, was instrumental in establishing the consortium. He says that while a wealth of preclinical data on chemopreventive agents for cancer exists, encouraging clinical trial results from testing such agents have not yet been obtained by researchers at any institution (with the important exception of tamoxifen for breast cancer). A significant problem appears to be that, based on the quality of the preclinical data, the agents taken to trial have been poor choices. The idea of the consortium arose to address those issues.

Chemoprevention is the use of drugs, vitamins, or other agents to try to reduce the risk of, or delay the development or recurrence, of cancer.
Source: National Cancer Institute

"We felt that because we have so much expertise in Minnesota on chemoprevention that we should pool our expertise and try to facilitate effective clinical trials," says Hecht.

"The goal of MC² is to develop an interactive collaborative network among the four institutions to facilitate and move forward chemoprevention and clinical trials," he says. "We hope that MC² will become a recognizable name that will become equivalent to successful chemoprevention clinical trials coming out of Minnesota."

This story was originally published in the University of Minnesota Cancer Center 2007 Annual Report.