Who's in your "Dream Team"?

[Paul Edwards]

If you could pick "The Best of the Best" or "The All-Time Greats", who would you pick in your Dream Team, a team of champions?

 

Whether it's cricket, rugby, AFL, soccer or basketball, everyone has a wish list for their Dream Team.

 

A few years ago some cancer organisations got together and said "If we could pick a Dream Team of Cancer Researchers, who would be in it?  Who are the Best of the Best?  Rather than having these leading scientists from different organisations competing for research funding, what would happen if we had the best researchers from the leading cancer centres working together on a problem?"

 

There are now 16 Cancer Dream Teams^#, including some working on Prostate Cancer.

 

What got me started on Dream Teams is that the SU2C-PCF Dream Team (Precision Therapy of Advanced Prostate Cancer) collaborated in the research on Olabarib.

 

The last 5-10 years has seen amazing changes in the treatment of advanced prostate cancer.  With the Dream Teams the next 5 years is going to be very exciting!

 

^# A Dream Team is a scientific task force, a collaboration of top researchers at different institutions who come together to develop new and improved approaches to cancer.  By pooling their knowledge and their resources and working together for common goals, they can make progress faster and move therapies and treatments from the laboratory to doctors’ offices, where they can benefit patients. Many research projects take many years to deliver benefits to patients. The Dream Team projects are designed to deliver patient benefits in the near term.

 

This distinctive approach to funding cancer research was specifically designed to eliminate barriers to creativity and collaboration by enabling scientists with different areas of expertise from different institutions across the United States and around the world to work together. The approach breaks down the “silos” that in the past have often kept scientists from working together.