"The effort is part of an aggressive strategy ... to leapfrog the bureaucracies of better-known research institutions to speed discoveries and get personalized treatment to patients quickly. 'The blank slate we were given didn't exist anywhere else,' said Lance Liotta, former chief of pathology at the National Cancer Institute, who along with Emanuel Petricoin, a former senior researcher at the Food and Drug Administration, and an eight-person research group was recruited to George Mason in 2005. Their approach has been to build tools and relationships to understand what drives disease, concentrating on early cancer detection and late-stage treatment, ..."