MOLECULAR AND IMMUNOLOGICAL TRANSLATIONAL SCIENCES (MITS) – PROJECT SUMMARY The MITS Shared Resource serves as a gateway for the study of both animal models of cancer and human-derived materials with a suite of skills and analytical techniques that allow University of Virginia Cancer Center (UVACC) Members to evaluate the impact of investigational agents on the diagnosis or treatment of cancer. MITS provides access to experts for planning, training, executing, and analyzing experiments that are run on state-of-the-art instrumentation within this Shared Resource and those available in other UVACC- supported Shared Resources. MITS instrumentation is located for easy access by UVACC Members. Instrumentation is run by expert technologists during normal working hours and is available for use by investigators during non-primetime hours once they have completed appropriate training. This Shared Resource is an expansion of the Animal Models of Disease Core, which was rated as Excellent during the last review. Minor comments from the previous review of the resource directed at the utilization of CRISPR-Cas9 technology to replace traditional gene targeting for creating conditional knockout and knock-in alleles have been addressed. MITS made significant equipment upgrades in the past five years and deepened the repertoire of patient-derived xenografts (PDX) available to researchers. MITS staff routinely interact with other UVACC Shared Resources, particularly the Biomolecular Analysis Facility, Biostatistics, Advanced Microscopy Facility, Flow Cytometry Core, and Biorepository and Tissue Research Facility, all of which help make MITS a nexus for highly-coordinated and efficient pre-clinical and clinical studies. MITS also is supported by the School of Medicine (SOM), which further lowers the cost for the UVACC users. MITS is reviewed annually by the UVACC leadership and the SOM Research Advisory Committee to determine the level of subsidy required to maintain a revenue neutral core. MITS is competitive in pricing, rapid in service turnout time, and provides guarantees matching or exceeding the standards set up by comparative shared resources nationally. The UVACC co-pay provided for Members makes MITS a cost-effective Shared Resource.