The Co-Clinical Imaging Research Resources Program (U24s)

The NCI Co-Clinical Imaging Research Resource Program (CIRP) focuses on optimization of quantitative imaging methods for precision medicine in preclinical and clinical settings. CIRP projects include four essential components: animal models (GEMMs or PDXs), co-clinical therapeutic trials, quantitative preclinical and clinical imaging methods, and informatics for supporting web-resources. The scientific objectives of the program are to provide cancer and imaging research communities with web-accessible resources for quantitative imaging in co-clinical trials and to encourage consensus on how quantitative imaging methods can be optimized to improve the quality of imaging results for co-clinical trials. CIRP supports ten co-clinical trial projects spanning a diverse range of tumor types, therapeutic interventions, and imaging modalities. To facilitate co-clinical imaging research, each CIRP project will establish a web resource to disseminate freely accessible and comprehensive information on experimental design, protocol and software development, modeling and information extraction, biological and pathological validations, multiscale data integration, and preclinical-clinical correlations.

CIRP projects and web resources

CIRP network and homepage

The CIRP Network includes a steering committee, CIRP teams, working groups (WGs), and associate members. The network's mission is to advance precision medicine by establishing and disseminating consensus-based best practices for co-clinical imaging and by developing optimized state-of-the-art quantitative imaging methodologies for disease detection, risk stratification, and therapeutic response assessment. The WGs include Animal Models and Co-Clinical Trials (AMCT) WG, Imaging Acquisition and Data Process (IADP) WG, and Informatics and Outreach (IMOR) WG. CIRP invites academic investigators who CIRP does not fund to join the network as associate members. The associate members contribute expertise and efforts to the WGs, to expand the scientific scope of the network and help achieve a broad consensus on co-clinical imaging.

CIRP organizes annual meetings and meeting sessions at scientific conferences or meetings by other NCI programs. CIRP annual meeting is open to the public with no registration fee. CIRP has a home page at the NCI Wiki site (https://wiki.nci.nih.gov/display/NCICRIP), which is a workspace for intra-network communications and scientific discussions and a website to share publicly accessible information, news/events, and hyperlinks to individual CIRP web resource.

Joining CIRP network as associate members

The CIRP network invites NCI and NIH-supported academic investigators with expertise in animal models (GEMMs or PDXs), co-clinical therapeutic trials, quantitative imaging in the preclinical and clinical settings, and informatics technology to join the CIRP network as associate members. Please see the Solicit Associate Members and the mission statement of Working Groups. As an associate member of the CIRP, you can contribute to developing a consensus on co-clinical imaging issues, expand the scientific scope of the CIRP and accelerate the dissemination of the CIRP resources.

Contact us:

For questions regarding the CIRP web resources, network, and associate membership, please contact CIRP program director Huiming Zhang (zhanghui@mail.nih.gov).