Cancer research nonprofit shuttering after 44 years

After 44 years, the Fremont-based Cancer Prevention Institute of California — which has maintained a massive trove of cancer diagnosis and treatment data for decades — is closing its doors, but the legacy of its work will carry on.

Over the past decade, competition for research funding, mostly from the government, has been gradually ratcheting up, and is the driving force behind the decision to wind things up, Matt O’Grady, the nonprofit’s interim CEO said Tuesday.

O’Grady said researchers at the institute were sending in more proposals for funding and finding less success over time, making it difficult for them to “cobble together the jigsaw puzzle of funding that they need to cover their entire operating expenses.” Since the early 1970s, the organization has maintained the Greater Bay Area Cancer Registry, which tracks the roughly 30,000 cancers diagnosed and 10,000 deaths from the disease each year in the nine-county region.

It feeds valuable data into the larger California Cancer Registry and federal resources like the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results program.

That registry will now be under the care of the University of California, San Francisco Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, for at least the next 10 years, O’Grady said. The transfer of the registry became official on Aug. 1.

The last of CPIC’s remaining researchers have been placed in positions at the university, as well as the Stanford Cancer Institute.

“Researchers who are based in large research institutions, like UCSF and Stanford, where they have hundreds of colleagues to collaborate with in finding funding, they can do much better than researchers who are based at small independent institutions like CPIC,” O’Grady said.

The institution has over the years conducted clinical trials, worked with patients, and published studies that shed light on the notorious disease, such as illustrating how breast cancer rates are steadily rising among Asian-Americans since 1988.

“Those kind of advancements in our understanding of cancer and what causes it and how to prevent it, were really the output of this organization that made it so viable and so important a component of the whole research community,” O’Grady said.

Because the researchers will be able to continue their work at other institutions, the important legacy of CPIC’s scientific and education missions will live on, O’Grady said. It was founded by Dr. Saul A. Rosenberg, who is currently a professor emeritus with Stanford’s School of Medicine.

UCSF will also continue to host the annual CPIC Breast Cancer Conference for cancer patients and survivors, which has been running for 17 years.

Pam Priest Naeve, who headed up CPIC’s community education programs for 40 years before retiring, said the organization did “a hell of a job.”

In addition to its research efforts and studies, she said the organization helped inform people about treatment options and reliable information sources for cancer patients and survivors through its conferences and day-to-day operations.

“Nobody wants to talk about cancer until they have to,” she said. She said it’s usually the most stressful time in a person’s life, and they need support and information to make good decisions.

“I think we changed lives for the better,” she said.

O’Grady said he expects the organization to have a “modest amount of financial reserves” left, and that will be used to endow one cancer research fellowship at both Stanford and UCSF.

For more information about CPIC, you can visit cpic.org.