Supporting Translational Research: the CBCRP's New Effort
Laurence Fitzgerald, Ph.D., CBCRP Core Funding Manager
The CBCRP is launching a new grant opportunity to support translational research. The Translational Research Award represents our ongoing commitment to support investigations that will have the greatest impact on breast cancer in the shortest time possible. These awards will be available in the upcoming 2007 funding year.
Much of the basic science research grant funding in the United States, while of incredible value for exploring new conceptual avenues and maintaining the vitality of our academic institutions, often appears insufficiently directed towards delivering a tangible benefit for the treatment of human disease. Clifton Leaf, in his exposé published in Fortune on March 22, 2004 (“Why We’re Losing the War on Cancer: And How to Win It”), lays some of the blame directly on the underlying approach for research funding. The “gold standard” for most researchers is the quest for an NIH R01 grant and the publication of their results in peer reviewed journals. This “R01 obsession” has led to our present status quo of pouring too much of our precious, disease-directed research dollars into slow, incremental science. How can we expect patientoriented, translational impact on breast cancer in this setting? As a timely follow-up, Mr. Leaf has also questioned the paradigm of placing patient “safety” as the paramount criteria for success in clinical drug testing (Fortune, Feb. 20, 2006). Of course, many funding agencies are aware of these issues, but how can we focus a researcher’s interest in pursuing translational efforts to defeat breast cancer and best identify the projects worthy of being funded?
One of the ways that we have tried to achieve this objective in the past was through our Translational Research Collaboration (TRC), which promoted cross-disciplinary collaborations as the driving force for achieving translation. The TRC award was a mixed success, with the majority of the projects leading to additional studies rather than use in the target population. We felt that we could do better, so we discontinued this award in 2004 while our advisory council and Program staff studied ways to improve our efforts in this area.
We identified four ways to improve our translation award. First, we developed a definition of translation that describes the type of progress we would like to see achieved through our awards. We defined the criteria for determining a project’s potential immediate effect on breast cancer as (1) the research discovery to be translated, (2) the application of the discovery, (3) the end point being targeted, and (4) the potential individual or population-level impact. Additionally, a successful project must identify the discrete barriers to translational progress and devise detailed strategies to overcome them.
Second, the “critical path” concept that the CBCRP uses to select IDEA (Innovative, Developmental, and Exploratory Award) grants has been adapted to identify the most appropriate translational projects for various research disciplines. The critical path is represented by a research topic’s progression from the exploratory and developmental phases into the testing and validation phases preceding practical application. The projects we are interested in funding must have progressed beyond the “proof of principle” stages and be poised for the final testing to overcome the barriers for either clinical application (“bench to bedside”) or effective interventions at the population level (“bench to trench”). We want to avoid funding research that only leads to similar research, as represented by the R01.
Third, the requirement for collaboration has been eliminated. This will allow researchers, reviewers, and the advisory council to focus attention on the translation and critical path aspects of the proposal. Finally, our advisory council will use a “letter of intent” (LOI) process to be more proactive in selecting the projects that would be allowed to apply and undergo peer review.
We are optimistic that the changes to the new Translational Research Award will inspire investigators and yield practical applications to defeat breast cancer. The full details of the new Translational Research Award can be found on the CBCRP website under the Apply link. Your feedback regarding this new award is welcome through our CBCRP Listens link at: www.cbcrp.org/contact/cbcrp_listens.php.
