Vermont Cancer Center Loses NCI Designation

From The Cancer Letter, Nov. 14, 2008:

Nov. 30 will be the last day for the Vermont Cancer Center to ask NCI to renew its designation as a comprehensive cancer center. The center will let that deadline pass.

Filing an application would have been futile, said Bernard Levin, a cancer prevention expert who came to the center as a consultant and agreed to serve as interim director for a few months.

“I had to deliver a tough message,” said Levin, former vice president for cancer prevention and population sciences at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. “I came there to tell the faculty and administration that this is not going to work. They didn’t need to spend time, money, and effort to try and submit a renewal they would have been ashamed of.”

The center’s infrastructure—particularly its clinical and translational research programs—no longer merits the prestigious designation it held for three decades, Levin said.

It’s not as though a tsunami gathered suddenly in the frigid waters of Lake Champlain to overwhelm the Burlington-based cancer center. The “matrix” center, affiliated with the University of Vermont and the non-profit Fletcher Allen Health Care, was warned repeatedly about the lack of institutional commitment, the lack of authority of the center director, and problems in the clinical research programs.

For the full story, click on The Cancer Letter Archive at left to download the Nov. 14 issue (subscription or day pass required).
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tags: NCI