Committed to Cancer Research Collaborations
The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine rises on a hill above Pitt’s campus in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. For some—patients visiting the medical offices, collaborators in the laboratories or students in the classrooms—the complex is indeed a beacon on a hill, offering care, healing and hope.
Throughout those halls, and in satellites and sites spread far beyond Pittsburgh (as distant as Italy and Ireland), Pitt scientists work together to research the biology of aging, neuroscience, vision and vision restoration, genome stability, regenerative medicine and biomedical device development. They’re asking and answering the big questions on vascular, developmental, structural, computational and systems biology.
So powerful is the focus on cancer that the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center has met the rigorous federal standards to be named a National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center—one of only 53 in the United States. Receiving the NCI designation places a cancer center among the top 4% of cancer centers in the United States.
Pitt’s research is steadily enhancing Pittsburgh’s reputation in the life sciences landscape. In the field of immunotherapy, which uses the body’s own immune system, researchers in the Pitt School of Medicine and UPMC Hillman Cancer Center took their immunotherapy research to market with the 2021 launch of Novasenta, a drug discovery and development company that focuses on the ecosystem that surrounds and constantly interacts with the tumor inside the body to develop immunotherapies.
In addition, startups BlueSphere Bio; Generian Pharmaceuticals; Abound Bio, Inc.; and the UPMC Genome Center, all incubated in recent years as a collaboration between Pitt and UPMC Enterprises, the health system’s venture capital arm.
Other cancer-focused Pitt startups, such as Oncorus, Inc.; INmune Bio, Inc.; KaliVir Immunotherapeutics, Inc.; and Replay, have raised significant venture capital and formed industry partnerships as they work toward or proceed through clinical trials.
