AGILENT TECHNOLOGIES AND THE MICHIGAN CENTER FOR TRANSLATIONAL PATHOLOGY

Every 19 minutes, a man dies from prostate cancer. Every 2.7 minutes, a new case is diagnosed. At this moment, approximately 2 million American men are living with the disease.

Those statistics make prostate cancer a prime target for researchers at the Michigan Center for Translational Pathology (MCTP). Under the leadership of Howard Hughes Investigator and U-M researcher Dr. Arul Chinnaiyan, the Center is striving to accelerate the rate at which molecular genetics research is "translated" from the laboratory into clinical settings.

In 2009, MCTP entered into a collaborative agreement with Agilent Technologies, a Hewlett-Packard spinoff that is today the world's leading manufacturer of test and measurement products. Agilent has pledged $500,000 to help develop better diagnostics and treatments for prostate cancer, a gift that is being matched dollar-for-dollar by the Prostate Cancer Foundation.

"We saw this as an opportunity to partner with a truly advanced lab that was bringing multiple scientific disciplines to look at very important clinical problems," says Gustavo Salem, Agilent vice president and general manager, Biological Systems Division. "This relationship will give us a better understanding of how to apply our technologies in a clinical research setting."

According to Chris Beecher, Ph.D., professor of pathology at the U-M Medical School, researchers at MCTP will pursue a systems-biological approach that simultaneously explores the disease at the biomedical and genetic levels. "We expect to be able to make a number of discoveries in prostate cancer and to develop new techniques that will be universally useful."