TTUHSC

Rush endowment steps up research

By George Schwarz
The Amarillo Independent

The chair-designate to the Mrs. J. Avery "Janie" Rush Endowed Chair of Excellence in Women's Health and Oncology wants to bring more National Institute of Health support to Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center and spend more of his time on outside-funded research.

Dr. Rusty Robinson

Dr. William "Rusty" Robinson, whose appointment to the endowed chair awaits routine formal approval from the university, said the role will protect more of his time for pure research interests.

"This campus particularly of the school has been interested for some time in establishing its research base," he said. "They've also recognized you can't be all things to all people, so therefore, they have to pick out specific niches which they feel like we could be a site of excellence."

One of those niches is the combination of women's health and oncology, he said.

The endowment from the Rush family arose from Mrs. Rush's battle with ovarian cancer about four years ago.

Robinson said he treated her, bringing her into one of the National Cancer Institute-sponsored clinical trials in which she agreed to participate. She responded well to the treatment and has been cancer-free since.

In gratitude, she and her family made the contribution to foster and expand that kind of research, Robinson said, adding that Mrs. Rush created the endowment working with Dr. Steven Berk, who was regional dean at the time and is now dean of the School of Medicine.

"So what that is going to allow me to do is to devote a little more of my time to expanding Texas Tech's research base," he said. "In other words, I can get Texas Tech involved in more funded research programs from the NCI or from foundation- sponsored research projects."

The endowment might open another door for the university — and opening that door is Robinson's first project.

Right now, Tech is an affiliate member of a research program called the Gynecology Oncology Group, administered for Tech under the University of California-Irvine's full membership. UC gets the federal money directly, sits on the group's board and makes decisions about what is going to occur.

As an affiliate, Tech can put patients into clinical trials but doesn't get the money directly. UC-Irvine takes out its administrative costs and gives Tech the remainder, he said. "As a full member, the money will come directly to us without a cut being taken out of it and secondly, we will get in essence a seat at the table so we will get decision making responsibility in the GOG."

The focus of the research will be broader than ovarian cancer, he explained.

"For example we will certainly pursue research along the lines of breast cancer, cancer prevention for women, on prevention and management of the side effects of therapy for cancer, genetics of cancer, as well as the specific disease entities, like ovarian cancer and cervical, endometrial and breast cancer and so forth.

"We want to try to expand it and make it comprehensive for cancers that affect women."

The program under the endowed chair will be collaboration between Texas Tech and Harrington Cancer Center, with the clinical trials infrastructure based at Harrington and fiscal support from Texas Tech. Because Harrington is now owned by Baptist St. Anthony's Health System, their executives had to sign off on the deal, and did. The collaboration won't restrict patients to BSA, he said.

"In other words we can still see patients and have patients at Northwest Texas Hospital participate in research. We can have patients on an out-patient setting at any of a number of places, either Harrington's outpatient department or Texas Tech's outpatient department participate in research also.

"In other words, if we want to do cancer prevention work, we can utilize Texas Tech's family medicine department, we can utilize their internal medicine department, whatever we want to use. So we are not limited to BSA, but they will be included certainly.

"This clearly is a step up for Texas Tech. We have not had an endowed chair or position dedicated to cancer research on the Amarillo campus of Texas Tech ever," Robinson said.

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Posted: January 24, 2008