Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center

Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center was one of the first cancer centers to receive the NCI designation in 1973. Today, it is the only NCI-Designated Comprehensive Cancer Center with three locations in Arizona, Florida, and Minnesota.

For more than 50 years, Mayo Clinic has helped transform the nation's cancer research efforts by focusing on a team approach to find new and better ways to prevent, intercept, diagnose and treat cancer. Every year, more than 130,000 people with cancer come to Mayo Clinic from all walks of life and from around the world to receive precision diagnoses and treatments tailored to their exact needs and cancer types.

Research at Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center

At Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center, a culture of innovation and collaboration is driving research breakthroughs, uncovering the cause and course of cancer for each person, and translating those findings into better prevention, screening, diagnosis, treatment, and survivorship.

Mayo Clinic’s cancer research focuses on: 

• Deepening cancer discovery science.
• Innovating new methods to detect and intercept cancer.
• Developing novel therapeutics and therapeutic modalities.
• Integrating data science, predictive modeling, and artificial intelligence (AI) into cancer care and research.
• Transforming cancer care and clinical trials to platform models that can be implemented across geographic boundaries to reduce cancer health disparities.

More than 400 outstanding physicians and scientists at Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center are dedicated to finding answers for the unmet medical needs of people with cancer. They ensure that the research they conduct and the care they deliver meet the needs of everyone in Mayo Clinic’s catchment areas and prioritizes their most important cancer challenges.

Select Scientific Initiatives at Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center

Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center has six cancer-focused research programs: Cancer Prevention, Control and Survivorship; Cancer Risk Assessment, Early Detection and Interception; Cancer Cell Genomics, Signaling and Metastasis; Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapeutics; Novel Therapeutics and Therapeutic Modalities; and Advanced Clinical Trials and Translational Sciences.

These research programs include five NCI Specialized Programs of Research Excellence (SPORE) grants in breast cancer, hepatobiliary cancer, multiple myeloma, and ovarian cancer. Additionally, Mayo Clinic collaborates with the University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center on a SPORE grant in leiomyosarcoma.

These programs and grants help give patients access to hundreds of clinical trials of all phases led by Mayo Clinic scientists who work with organizations around the world through cancer cooperative groups and collaborations. These far-reaching networks help advance cancer breakthroughs and expand access for people with cancer.

Mayo Clinic's research success stories include:

• Discovering that chimeric antigen receptor (CAR-T cell) therapy fails in some patients due to an elevated amount of protein interleukin-4 (IL-4), a protein that regulates inflammation and immunity.
• Identifying changes in body composition and metabolism and blood-based biomarkers that occur as pancreatic cancer develops that may aid in early detection.
• Demonstrating that engineering mesenchymal stromal cells with chimeric antigen receptors shows potential in enhancing their ability to target specific cells or markers and improve their therapeutic impact on inflammatory disease.
• Biomanufacturing an experimental cell-based ovarian cancer vaccine and combining it with immunotherapy to study a one-two punch approach to halting disease progression.
• Advancing research that may help healthcare professionals detect endometrial cancer earlier by testing vaginal fluid for cancer-specific methylated DNA markers.
• Finding that radiomics-based machine learning models may detect pancreatic cancer on prediagnostic CT scans substantially earlier than current methods for clinical diagnosis.
• Identifying 550 people (1.24% of 44,000 study participants) as carriers of hereditary cancer-causing mutations based on genetic screenings. Half of these people were previously unaware of their hereditary genetic risk, and 40% did not meet existing clinical guidelines for genetic testing.
• Showing that 1 in 6 patients with colorectal cancer had an inherited cancer-related gene mutation, which likely predisposed them to the disease, and 60% of these cases would not have been detected if relying on a standard guideline-based approach.
• Filling critical gaps in the understanding of how inherited breast cancer genes, beyond BRCA1 and BRCA2, predispose people to disease, which directly influences cancer care.
• Developing Cologuard, the DNA stool test co-developed by Mayo Clinic and Exact Sciences Corporation and now a colorectal cancer screening tool recommended by the US Preventive Services Task Force.

* The information on this cancer center was provided by the Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center.