The Office of the Director (OD) provides overall leadership for the Division, and works across the programs to prioritize objectives, develop strategies and allocate the Division budget to provide appropriate resources and staff to meet the Division goal. The OD promotes the integration of activities between the programs of the Division and across the Institute to align them with the overall Institute mission and vision.

The OD facilitates and promotes inter-programmatic, inter-Divisional, inter-Institute, inter-Agency and industry interactions.

A gap area in scientific and clinical research, AIDS malignancies, is led and coordinated through the OD, in joint agreement with NIAID and the Office of AIDS Research, NIH. The OD developed and implemented an AIDS malignancies clinical research program that coordinates AIDS malignancies initiatives across the NCI as well as NIH and the Office of AIDS Research. This program includes a working group of scientists and clinicians from the extramural community, NIH and patient representatives to prioritize major scientific opportunities and unmet clinical needs, a clinical trials network, a specimen resource, a resource handbook, an annual international meeting, and works jointly through DTP and NIAID on an inter-Institute pilot program of drug discovery and development in the cancers and opportunistic infections of relevance to immunosuppressed patients with cancer or AIDS.