SAN ANTONIO –  The Cancer Therapy & Research Center (CTRC) at The UT Health Science Center at San Antonio is pleased to announce Ian Thompson, M.D., director of the CTRC genitourinary clinic and professor and chairman of the Department of Urology at The UT Health Science Center School of Medicine, has been selected to serve as a co-chair for the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Genitourinary Steering Committee.

Dr. Thompson was selected as one of three co-chairs for this distinguished leadership position due to his international reputation for prostate cancer research and due to the report of the Clinical Trials Working Group issued in 2004.  In this report, the NCI provided recommendations on the restructuring of the clinical trials enterprise supported by the NCI.  One of the initiatives set forth by the NCI was to establish a network of disease-specific scientific steering committees involving the broad oncology community.

There will be three co-chairs of the Genitourinary Steering Committee:  Dr. Thompson, representing urology, Dr. Anthony Zeitman (Massachusetts General Hospital) representing radiation oncology and a medical oncologist yet to be named.  The co-chairs of the steering committee are voting members and serve as leaders of the committee, guiding the committee’s direction.  Among the important tasks for the steering committee are reviewing protocol concepts and recommending approval, revision or disapproval of the concept to the Cancer Treatment Evaluation Program with the ultimate goal of the NCI moving toward a comprehensive approach to the development evaluation and prioritization of clinical trials in genitourinary cancers.

The Cancer Therapy & Research Center at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio Located in San Antonio, Texas, The Cancer Therapy & Research Center (CTRC) at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio is one of the nation’s leading academic research and treatment centers, serving more than 4.4 million people in the high-growth corridor of Central and South Texas including Austin, San Antonio, Laredo and the Rio Grande Valley. CTRC is one of a few elite cancer centers in the country to be named a National Cancer Institute (NCI) Designated Cancer Center, and is one of only three in Texas.  CTRC handles more than 120,000 patient visits each year and is a world leader in developing new drugs to treat cancer. The CTRC Institute for Drug Development (IDD) is internationally recognized for conducting the largest oncology Phase I clinical drug trials program in the world, and participated in the clinical and/or preclinical development of many of the cancer drugs approved by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration.  For more information, visit our Web site at http://www.ctrc.uthscsa.edu