Strategic Partners for the Evaluation of Predictive Signatures of Prostate Cancer (SPECS)
The UCI SPECS consortium terminated in June 31, 2011. The resources and goals of the SPECS program have been continued as the NCI Early Detection Research Network program at UC Irvine. The SPECS consortium was an observational clinical trial which utilized prostate tissues and clinical values obtained by informed consent to derive gene signatures predictive of outcome at the time of diagnosis. The Principal Investigator and Director of this consortium is Dr. Dan Mercola from the University of California, Irvine. Seven sites have participated in this study over a 5-year period.
Consortium partners for patient and sample acquisition are:
- Michael McClelland, Vaccine Research Institute of San Diego, CA.
- Jessica Wang-Rodriguez, University of California, San Diego
- Chung Lee, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL
- Joseph Rogers and Thomas Beach, Sun Health Research Institute, Phoenix, AZ (normal samples only)
- David Duggan and Jeffrey Trent, Translational Genomics (TGen), Phoenix, AZ (SNP signature analysis)
- Stan Krajewski and John Reed, Burnham Institute for Medical Research, La Jolla, CA (Tissue microarrays are fabricated)
- Philip Carpenter, University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine
Bioinformatics and biostatistics are provided by Michael McClelland (VRI), James Koziol (TSRI, La Jolla), and Zhenyu Jia (UCI). Supported and commercial partners have been developed as summarized on the following pages.
You are welcome to read the SPECS Annual Report provided on this website. It includes a summary of all activities and accomplishments, publications, and patent applications together with an Appendix of six tables quantifying resources was provided to the NCI in June of 2010 (Annual Report, Year 5).