Background of the BCRP
Breast Cancer Act
In 1993, the California Legislature passed and the Governor signed the Breast Cancer Act and enabling legislation (AB 2055 and AB 478), which established the Breast Cancer Research Program and the Breast Cancer Control Program and funded these programs with a portion of the revenue from an increase in the State tobacco tax. Assemblywoman Barbara Friedman is the author of these bills, as well as AB 3391 in 1994, which amended them. The new tax revenue, which began to be collected on January 1, 1994, is deposited in the Breast Cancer Fund. Forty-five percent is allocated to fund research on the cause, cure, treatment, earlier detection, and prevention of breast cancer. Fifty percent is allocated to fund early breast cancer detection services for uninsured and underinsured women through a program administered by the State Department of Health Services. The statutory language further expresses the intent that these two new State programs be developed in consultation with one another. The remaining five percent of the new tobacco tax revenue is allocated to the California Cancer Registry.
Breast Cancer Research Program
The enabling legislation requested that the University of California establish and administer the Breast Cancer Research Program (BCRP) to fund breast cancer research in fields including, but not limited to, biomedical sciences and engineering; the social, economic, and behavioral sciences; epidemiology; technology development and translation; and public health. Research grants and contracts may be awarded to qualifying public, private, or nonprofit agencies or individuals in California. Pursuant to the Legislature's intent, research funds are awarded based on BCRP's research priorities and the scientific merit of the proposed research, as determined by open, competitive peer review. The President of the University of California assigned specific responsibility for establishing and managing BCRP to the Vice President-Health Affairs, Cornelius L. Hopper, M.D. BCRP manages all programmatic and fiscal aspects of the grant program and is aided by other units within the Office of the President, including Research Administration, General Counsel, Risk Management, Corporate Audits, and Federal Laboratory Management. The legislation limits the University's administrative expenditures to five percent of the BCRP appropriation.
Breast Cancer Research Council
The University receives advice and direction concerning the management of BCRP from the Breast Cancer Research Council, as called for by the enabling legislation. The University appointed Council members to represent breast cancer survivor advocacy groups, scientists, breast cancer medical specialists, not-for-profit health organizations, for-profit industry, and the State Department of Health Services Breast Cancer Control Program. The Council roster appears in this compendium. The Council concurred in the research priorities, award mechanisms, and evaluation procedures that constituted the first grant cycle.
The First Grant Cycle – 1995
Evaluation and Funding Process
The Breast Cancer Act and enabling legislation called for BCRP to fund innovative and creative breast cancer research that complements, rather than duplicates, research that has been funded by the federal government and other agencies. In an effort to achieve this objective and to maximize the impact of the research that is funded, BCRP only invited applications for research that addresses a limited set of priority breast cancer research issues. The priority issues for the first cycle were:
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to enhance understanding of the etiology and pathogenesis of breast cancer;
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to develop more effective techniques for the earlier detection of breast cancer;
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to develop new approaches to prevent breast cancer; and
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to increase access to services for the early detection of breast cancer, particularly for underserved women.
The priorities may change in future cycles.
BCRP considered applications for six award mechanisms:
Research Project Awards – To support fully-developed, investigator-initiated research projects in areas representing the principal investigator's interests and expertise.
Innovative Developmental and Exploratory Awards (IDEAs) – To support develop mental, exploratory, or pilot research, or high-risk/high-outcome research.
New Investigator Awards –To support newly independent investigators at a level that is sufficient to enable them to initiate their own research programs.
Postdoctoral Fellowship Awards –To provide individuals with doctoral degrees additional research training that will broaden their scientific background for research in breast cancer.
Sabbatical Awards –To enable established investigators to move into breast cancer research from another field or to explore an area of breast cancer research that is new for them.
Training Program Awards –To enable educational programs to train graduate or undergraduate students for research careers in disciplines which are important to breast cancer research.
Award mechanisms may change in future cycles.
Any investigator in California was eligible to be awarded a grant as long as the investigator met the requirements for the award mechanism and the research was to be conducted in California.
The grant applications received were evaluated by 108 peer reviewers in ten study sections. The membership of each study section comprised leading investigators and one breast cancer patient advocate; members were drawn from throughout the U.S. The study section rosters are included in this compendium. Reviewers designated "ad hoc" evaluated only one or two applications and did not attend the meeting. The evaluation procedure is modeled on the one used by the National Institutes of Health.
The primary basis on which funding decisions were made was the scientific or scholarly merit of the proposed research. Special consideration was given to the following criteria to choose among projects of equal scientific merit:
- innovativeness
- multidisciplinary research
- research on reducing cultural barriers to accessing the health care system for early detection of breast cancer (where applicable)
- research on facilitating the delivery of improved detection techniques and prevention procedures (i.e., translational research).
The Breast Cancer Research Council arrived at recommendations of grants to be funded after considering the peer reviewers' evaluations on the criteria the Council had specified. The University of California followed the Council's recommendations in awarding these grants.
Awards
In this first grant cycle, BCRP awarded approximately $18.5 million to 76 investigators at 22 California institutions and organizations. The 76 awards constitute 32 percent of the 235 qualified applications.
This compendium lists the funded grants by study section, including the project title, the principal investigator, the institution or organization, and the project abstract.
