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Unit 14: Project Management

4. Communicating the project vision to keep the team motivated and focused. Notes

5. Communicating with the department chair, NIH, journal editors, and the external
collaborators.

Keeping Your Work on Track

It is hard to predict how the course of a project will run. Flexible planning is needed to help you
deal with the unexpected and still keep your many projects moving.

14.6 Project Management

14.6.1 A Real-life Example

It can be understood in the following manner:

The Statement of Work

It consists of the following:

Section 1: Purpose

Background: Theresa, a postdoc in the laboratory, wants to examine the possible role for
alterations in the gene Sumacan in prostate cancer. She noted that Sumacan, which encodes a
growth factor receptor, maps to a genetic region involved in human prostate cancer. Current
studies in the lab focus on the role of Sumacan in brain tumors. Bob, a postdoc, is screening drugs
that block Sumacan function; Ming Li, a graduate student, is elucidating the functional pathways
Sumacan is involved in; and Steve, a graduate student, is performing a mutational analysis of
the Sumacan gene. These same studies can be applied to prostate cancer, thereby opening up
potential avenues for funding through prostate cancer foundations.

Scope of work: Examine whether the functional pathway for Sumacan is present in human
prostate cancer cells.

Compare the expression of Sumacan in normal human prostate tissues and prostate cancers, and
correlate expression levels with clinical outcome in prostate cancer. Identify mutations in
Sumacan in patients with prostate cancer.
Strategy: Each person in the lab is already working on different aspects of Sumacan biology in
brain tumors. In each case, the work will be applied to prostate cancer cell lines that we will
obtain from Mike, a colleague in our department. We have identified two additional potential
collaborators—Rajiv, a pathologist who studies human prostate tissues and cancers, and Kathy,
a geneticist who studies human prostate cancer families. We will use funds from our current R01
grant to obtain preliminary findings. We plan to use these findings to obtain a second R01 grant
to the laboratory.

Section 2: Objective

Statement: Investigate the possible role of Sumacan in prostate cancer.
Measure 1: Our experiments will provide preliminary evidence to either support or deny a role
for Sumacan in prostate cancer.

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