Program Support

We would like to thank the following sponsors for their generous support, without which many of our research and educational programs would not be possible.

Chapman Fund

The research enterprise under Professor John Weinstein in the Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology has received very generous gifts since 2010 from the Mary K. Chapman Foundation. Those funds have been particularly important to the team’s research because they have not been restricted to particular, narrowly defined projects. Chapman’s generosity has thus made it possible for the team to think creatively and take on high risk/high reward science. It has also provided seed money for fresh ideas that could later be turned into NIH grants, as has been the case for 4 NIH grants obtained. A major innovative theme of the Chapman-supported research has been development of dynamically interactive, highly visual software that is complex but nonetheless usable by biologists and clinical researchers who cannot program. A second major theme has been collaborative support for many clinical research programs on cancer and COVID-19 throughout MD Anderson. Overall, the Chapman Program for Bioinformatics has contributed to over 140 publications as of 2020, 47 of them in the highest-ranked half-dozen biomedical journals.

The Lorraine Dell Program in Bioinformatics for Personalization of Cancer Medicine

The Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology received a very generous grant from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation in honor of Mrs. Lorraine Dell to develop a Program in Bioinformatics for Personalization of Cancer Medicine. Mrs. Dell has contributed in a major way to the life of MD Anderson Cancer Center, serving on its Board of Visitors since 2005 and taking on other important responsibilities. The Lorraine Dell Program focuses on the current transition from microarray data (fundamentally analog) to “next-generation sequencing” data (fundamentally digital) on cancer genomes – in particular on the use of such data to select the right therapy for each individual cancer patient. The sequencing data sets are enormous but also enormously rich; the challenge is great, but so is the opportunity. As one the world’s foremost institutions for clinical research on cancer, MD Anderson is ideally positioned to leverage the genomic information for the benefit of cancer patients and their families. The Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology is pursuing that mission in close collaboration with the many superb translational and clinical research groups around MD Anderson.