New Program Initiatives—Breaking our Mold
Katherine McKenzie, Ph.D., CBCRP Biomedical Research Administrator
New Directions
As the fourth largest funder of breast cancer research in the world, we in the CBCRP expect to make a difference in the fight against breast cancer. We have done this in the past by trying to devote all of our funding to highly innovative investigator-initiated research. This strategy has yielded significant rewards, but hasn't allowed us to fill research gaps as effectively as we would like. Additionally it has caused us to distribute our resources over broad research areas, diminishing our potential impact on the disease.
In the wake of our program evaluation, we decided it was time to break our mold. We challenged ourselves to find ways to focus our resources on questions that could change the face of breast cancer research. We decided to commit 30 percent of our funds over the next five years to Program Initiatives that would bring California resources to bear on questions that, if answered, could identify concrete steps for eliminating breast cancer.
To select the topics of our Program Initiative, we ascertained the research interests of the scientific and advocate communities in California, analyzed the gaps in current breast cancer research knowledge, considered the funding opportunities currently offered by other agencies, and assessed the under-utilized resources available in California. We chose to investigate the influence of lifestyle and the environment on breast cancer and to uncover the reasons for the unequal burden of breast cancer.
California should be able to make headway into these issues because of the extensive infrastructure in place in the state as well as the diversity of its geography and population. Established California databases—such as the California Cancer Registry, the Pesticide Use Report Database, the California Digital Conservation Atlas, the Proposition 65 chemical list, and the Pesticide Illness Surveillance Database—and the regional variations in the California landscape offer an excellent opportunity to investigate the environmental relationship to breast cancer. The racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity in California communities will allow us to investigate the unequal burden of breast cancer and the influence of lifestyle on the disease. Because California has a vast research network involving both academic and for-profit research institutions, the resources are in place to answer these questions.
Next Steps
Identifying the research topics has given us a starting point. Our next step in sorting out these issues will represent a new approach for the CBCRP. Rather than offering our traditional, broadly defi ned request for proposals in the Program Initiative subject areas, we will convene a blue-ribbon task force to advise us on our next steps.
The task force will be comprised of researchers and advocates from across the country. They will be experts with a wide variety of backgrounds such as environmental justice, epidemiology, toxicology, and endocrinology both inside and outside of the breast cancer field.
The charge of the task force will be to refine the Program Initiative topics, report on the state of the science, identify the pivotal areas where progress would result in significant advancement in defeating breast cancer, and generate an action plan for filling the research gaps. The options they conceive could range from offering targeted requests for applications in rigorously defined research areas to providing infrastructure for research by funding collaborative projects between the CBCRP and other state entities. We will encourage task force members to stretch their creativity in envisioning these options—and to complete their work in one year.
The task force will identify opportunities for the CBCRP to branch out into exciting and productive new directions. We expect there will be some key projects in the action plan that the CBCRP will be ideally suited to undertake. Other task force suggestions may be beyond the scope of the CBCRP's mission, but could still make an impact on breast cancer by providing inspiration for other agencies.
Through our Program Initiatives and our new approach to executing them, we look forward to building major inroads into our understanding of the causes and the ultimate prevention of breast cancer.
