Continuing its support of medical innovation, the L.K. Whittier Foundation announced it is expanding upon the cutting-edge research initiatives with a $5 million gift for the USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center.

The gift will extend funding of the foundation’s Innovative Tailored Therapies Initiative at USC/Norris and the Keck School of Medicine of USC. The foundation previously supported the establishment of the initiative in 2002.

Created in 1955 by Leland K. Whittier and the Whittier family, the Los Angeles-based foundation supports innovative endeavors in education, the sciences, and health and medicine.

The Whittier Initiative is a multi-year program that addresses the needs of scientists in developing successful new therapies to treat cancer patients. The latest gift will support the program for five years.

“The initiative has been instrumental in enabling more than 40 faculty physicians to conduct pilot research studies,” said Peter Jones, director of USC/Norris. “These studies have led to additional federal funding, clinical trials and publications, and they continue to push the cancer research frontier in our quest to deliver more effective therapies.”

Funding from the Whittier Foundation has led to patients receiving access to new non-toxic therapies and the development of new detectors for lung cancer.

Tailoring therapies for individuals and predicting a patient’s cancer risk is a hallmark of USC/Norris, Jones said. And that is the sort of science the Whittier Initiative was designed to fund – science that could make a difference in the lives of all cancer patients.

“A researcher’s success is usually measured by how much grant funding he or she receives,” Jones said. “Here, we want to measure them by the fact that they actually did something to help patients. The foundation’s gift allows us to do that.”