Changes in Core Funding Strategy
Laurence Fitzgerald, Ph.D., CBCRP Biomedical Research Administrator
Historical Perspective
In 1995, when the CBCRP began funding breast cancer research grants in California, we were instructed by the founding legislation with the following key guidelines:
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“…a comprehensive grant and contract program to support research efforts into the cause, cure, treatment, earlier detection, and prevention of breast cancer.”
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“Breast cancer research includes, but is not limited to, research in the fi elds of biomedical science and engineering; the social, economic, and behavioral sciences; epidemiology; technology development and translation; and public health.”
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“The program shall fund innovative and creative research, with a special emphasis on research that complements, rather than duplicates, the research funded by the federal government and other entities.”
In addition, the Program's advisory Council is charged to “develop the strategic objectives and priorities of the program” and to “consider a broad range of cross-disciplinary breast cancer research.”
In seeking to meet these guidelines and objectives, the CBCRP has offered a wide spectrum of award types (over 15) and set nine priority issue topics for invited research. We established a two-tiered funding process that included peer review to rank scientific merit and rating of programmatic responsiveness by the advisory Council. During our fi rst ten years we have added to and made changes to our award types, priority issues, and funding process. We are currently in the middle of our tenth funding cycle, but through the fi rst nine years our overall effort looked like this:
| Year (Cycle) | # Of Grants | Award Amount |
| 2003 (Cycle IX) | 52 | $11.5M |
| 2002 (Cycle VIII) | 67 | $14.8M |
| 2001 (Cycle VII) | 66 | $18.7M |
| 2000 (Cycle VI) | 70 | $16.5M |
| 1999 (Cycle V) | 61 | $15.6M |
| 1998 (Cycle IV) | 52 | $16.8M |
| 1997 (Cycle III) | 63 | $14.1M |
| 1996 (Cycle II) | 60 | $14.5M |
| 1995 (Cycle I) | 78 | $19.8M |
| Totals | 569 | >$142M |
Although we are proud of our supported research and accomplishments, we have to ask ourselves, “How successful were we at funding breast cancer research that met our stated goals?” Overall, we have received positive feedback from our funded investigators and the researchers and advocates we invite to serve as peer reviewers. Many of our reviewers say, “I wish we had a Program like yours in our state.” However, we realized that key elements of our funding strategy were not as successful as we had hoped. Certain of our research topic priorities—such as Health Policy & Health Services, Etiology (which we revised to focus on the environment), and Racial & Ethnic Differences in Breast Cancer—attracted very few applications. These were topics where California offered tremendous opportunities, but were not well-addressed by the conventional style of grant funding. In addition, despite our attempts to offer collaborative, translational, and cross-disciplinary award types, the CBCRP was funding very few grants in these areas. Some of our career development award types received little interest. Finally, despite our best intentions, it was apparent that many of our larger innovative grants (IDEA-II and STEP) represented cut-down R01s and were not true “high risk-high reward” projects. These issues limited us in fulfilling the CBCRP's mission and did not adequately allow us to complement and distinguish our efforts from other agencies. It was time for a change.
New CBCRP Core Funding award types and research priorities:
With assistance from Program staff, our advisory Council objectively considered the following questions: Where are we most successful? Where are the best opportunities to fund new research? What would serve to distinguish the CBCRP's efforts from other funding agencies?
In terms of award types, our solution is to limit our future funding to three areas:
- Innovative (IDEA) grants with a special category for “junior investigators”
- Career development funding only in the Dissertation and Postdoctoral Fellowship categories
- Community-based collaboration and participatory research, which are our CRC Pilot and Full award types
Both the IDEA and career development awards will have application guidelines that require more project focus and training specifi city to breast cancer. In addition, a funded IDEA will be eligible for competitive renewal. We will continue to offer our Joining Forces Conference Awards, especially to support researcher-advocate and cross-disciplinary events to advance mutual interactions.
Next, we are simplifying our priority issues to four broad areas of interest:
- The Community Impact of Breast Cancer: the social context
- Etiology and Prevention: finding the underlying causes
- Biology of the Breast Cell: the basic science of the disease
- Detection, Prognosis, and Treatment: delivering clinical solutions
It will remain important for applicants to explain the responsiveness of the proposed research to important breast cancer topics in these four priority issues.
We will continue to use peer and programmatic reviews to make funding decisions. However, we will no longer designate either award types or priority issues as “primary” to qualify for preference in funding. Thus, all applications will be considered equally. The full description for our new Core Funding will be available in the Call for Applications to be distributed in July and posted on our Web site. The detailed application instructions and forms will be available on our Web site in September.
Expected outcomes of the CBCRP's Core Funding:
We anticipate that our Core Funding effort will better match the Program's mission and the needs of California researchers. It is our intention that funded projects serve as springboards to initiate new, critical research that can successfully compete for funding from other agencies. We believe our changes are consistent with the original legislative guidelines and take advantage of the lessons we have learned during our first ten years.
