Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Gary Hammer: Adrenal cancer groups at the University of Michigan and the University
of São Paulo have been engaged in adrenal cancer research for well over a decade. For
about the last five years we have been working together towards a common goal. That goal
is to find effective therapies for this rare and fatal disease.
Adrenal cancer research is important in Brazil for a few reasons. One is that adrenal cancer
is 10-15 times more prevalent in Brazil than anywhere else in the world.
Two, because adrenal cancer is so rare, with only 500 cases per year occurring in the United
States, it's only through collaboration that we can accomplish the goals of finding effective
treatments for this disease.
The great benefits of working with the University of São Paulo is that the mission resonates
deeply with our tripartite mission at the University of Michigan; that being education,
research, and clinical care. So it's obvious for a rare disease like adrenal cancer to
make any sort of progress is going to demand intense collaboration with groups that have
the expertise in that cancer.
So for adrenal cancer our collaboration with the University of São Paulo is absolutely
critical for any success that we have had and any success that we hope to have in the
future.
What we really hope this trip does is, one, galvanize some of the interactions we already
have, but also perhaps provide a model about how interacting together with a large group
of faculty and scholars at the University of São Paulo can achieve great things, across
the landscape of research, education, and other forms of scholarship.
Personally what I hope to get out of this is that, with our University of São Paulo
colleagues, we can indeed make a real difference in the lives of patients with adrenal cancer.