Developmental Research Program - SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The purpose of the Developmental Research Program (DRP) is to fund promising projects by investigators whose current work may not focus exclusively on hepatocellular carcinoma, but who propose highly innovative translational studies of hepatocellular carcinoma that could become full SPORE projects or compete successfully for funding outside of the SPORE. The DRP provides a unique venue for making available significant financial support, and for demonstrating active institutional support, through a program that is rapidly responsive to new ideas or initiatives. Moreover, this program is rooted in a spirit of collaboration espoused by the SPORE investigators, who have an extensive track-record of bringing investigators from other disciplines into hepatocellular carcinoma research. The strength of the Developmental Research Program rests in its ability to make available financial support needed to access all the critical expertise and resources within the entire SPORE. This will allow us to develop collaborative, multi-investigator, multi-institutional research projects with the support of innovative, investigator-initiated projects that have the potential to flourish into reliable and productive translational research projects that make a path from basic and/or population research projects into research focused on human clinical specimens/patient populations.