[4] On May 25, 2007, the Texas House of Representatives passed HJR 90 to put a $3 billion bond proposal for the establishment of CPRIT on the November 2007 statewide ballot.
"[6] "This initiative will help our colleges and universities establish Texas as a major medical research corridor and, most importantly, send a powerful message of hope to the cancer community: Help is on the way," said Senator Jane Nelson, R-Lewisville.
[5] June 6, 2007, Governor Rick Perry signed HJR 90 into law, setting the stage for a November vote on Proposition 15 to establish CPRIT.
"[20] In June 2013, Governor Perry signed Senate Bill 149 to clarify and strengthen conflict-of-interest and peer review procedures at CPRIT and implement all state auditor recommendations.
[21] CPRIT announced on June 15, 2015, that it reached a new milestone: more than 2 million cancer prevention services had been provided to Texans in all 254 counties of the state.
[23] In June 2017 Governor Abbott signed into law Senate Bill 81, extending CPRIT's Sunset Review date by two years from 2021 to 2023.
[25] In October 2018, CPRIT grantee Jim Allison, Ph.D., chair of Immunology and executive director of the immunotherapy platform at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for launching an effective new way to attack cancer by treating the immune system rather than the tumor.
[26] In October 2018, CPRIT grantee Livia S. Eberlin, assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Texas, was named as a MacArthur fellow, a prestigious award that includes a $625,000, no-strings-attached grant.
[27] Also in October 2018, another CPRIT grantee, UT Southwestern biochemist Dr. Zhijian "James" Chen, won the 2019 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for his discovery of the cGAS enzyme that launches the body's immune defense against infections and cancers.
Dr. WalkerPeach previously served as Innovation-Corps (I-Corps) Program Director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Alexandria, Virginia.
The non-profit foundation accepted donations and gave money to CPRIT executives in addition to the salaries they received as state employees.