Our Strategy for Funding Research
What use of our research dollars will do the most to end the human suffering caused by breast cancer? This question guides us when we decide which research to fund. Every three years, the CBCRP’s Breast Cancer Research Council and staff set the priorities for research funding. These priorities, which we review yearly, are based on the Council’s judgment of what critical research the CBCRP can add to move most rapidly toward the prevention and cure of breast cancer.
Extra Efforts to Encourage Research in Areas that Need More Study
We encourage research in new directions in several ways. One is by identifying
areas that need more research and funding these areas first. The CBCRP
first funds proposals in the areas of Etiology; Health Policy and Health
Services; Racial and
Ethnic Differences in Breast Cancer; Sociocultural, Behavioral, and Psychological
Issues; Prevention and Risk Reduction; and Biology of the Normal Breast.
After all the research proposals meeting the CBCRP’s high standards
for scientific merit and
innovation in these areas are funded, the remaining funds are used to make
grants for studies in more widely researched areas. These include Earlier
Detection, Innovative Treatments, and Pathogenesis.
We decided to fund some areas first because in past years, even when we
made under-researched areas a priority, scientists did not submit enough
promising proposals for research in these areas. We first used this system
for allocating our
research funds during 2002. The effort was successful and even more successful
in 2003. For 2003, we received many more proposals that met our high standards
in the areas we’ve identified as under-researched. The six under-researched
areas we funded first during 2003 received 69 percent of the research funds
we granted for the year.
A New Emphasis for 2003: Environmental Causes of Breast Cancer
During 2003, the CBCRP emphasized two of our high-priority research areas— Etiology
and Prevention, with an emphasis on the environmental causes of breast
cancer and their effects on different communities of California women.
We’re making the search for environmental causes of the disease a
high priority because women whose lives have been affected by breast cancer
have urged us to do so. The topic has been on the CBCRP’s list of
research topics to be funded since our founding; however, we have received
few proposals in this area. By making it one of the CBCRP’s highest
priorities, we hope to inspire more scientists to pursue this line of research.
California is an ideal laboratory for research into the environment-breast cancer connection. The state has varied geography, heavily industrialized areas, and a large agricultural area. It has a mix of urban, suburban, small town, and rural communities. These variations mean that different communities of California women face very different exposures in their environments. The state’s ethnic diversity makes it possible to investigate whether exposure to a substance or other factor in the environment affects some ethnic groups differently than others. California also has communities with the highest rates of breast cancer in the nation.
Influencing the Research System Nationwide
The CBCRP is part of a much larger research system. The federal government
funds breast cancer research through agencies like the National Cancer
Institute and the Department of Defense. Nonprofit organizations and
for-profit corporations also fund breast cancer research. Although the
CBCRP is the largest state-funded source of breast cancer research in
the nation, the funds we grant still make up only a small part of the
funds granted through the larger system. We try to influence this larger
research system to move in new, creative directions.
An example is CBCRP funding for research that has a high potential for scientific payoff—and also a high potential for failure. When the CBCRP began funding breast cancer research in 1995, less than 10 percent of research proposals submitted to the federal government’s funding agencies were successful. This led the people who decided what got funded—panels of research experts—to look for proposals that seemed most likely to succeed.
Research scientists had to have done a significant portion of the research, and have strong preliminary data, before they could even get a grant. This made it hard for anyone to get funding in order to try out a high-risk idea. However, high-risk ideas are often the source of scientific breakthroughs.
We originated our Innovative, Developmental, and Exploratory Awards (IDEAs) to change this situation. IDEA grants are specifically designed to encourage scientists to investigate high-risk questions. If the research succeeds, the researcher may well be able to get another research funding agency to fund the next step. For example, we gave Robert Debs, M.D., from the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, an IDEA grant in 1997 to investigate gene therapy for breast cancer. When the research results showed promise, he was able to get funding from the federal government’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) to pursue the research on a much larger scale.
To get creative new research going, we also encourage and train researchers in California to submit exciting new ideas. In addition, we train scientific experts from outside California, who review research proposals submitted to the program for scientific merit, to use criteria that result in funding for promising new research concepts. We even developed a new scoring system to help reviewers read proposals with a perspective toward rewarding highrisk research.
Enlarging the Pool of Breast Cancer Researchers
Another one of our major goals is to increase the number of talented scientists
engaged in breast cancer research. We make several types of grants to
meet this goal. These include Postdoctoral awards, New Investigator awards,
and Training Program awards. Recent evaluations of the Postdoctoral and
New
Investigator awards yielded the suggestion that we make grants to talented scientists even earlier in their careers. This led us, during 2002, to institute three new types of grants. Dissertation grants fund masters’ and doctoral students’ dissertation research into breast cancer; Mentored Scholar awards fund new researchers who are not yet ready to become independent investigators for work under an experienced researcher-mentor. Diversity Supplements allow scientists we fund to support and mentor promising graduate or undergraduate students who face economic or social barriers to pursuing a career in breast cancer research.
Two Criteria: Priority Issues and Award Types
Every research grant we fund must qualify under two separate sets of categories,
the Priority Issues and the Award Types. The CBCRP’s Priority Issues
are broad, to allow us to have an impact across a wide spectrum of breast
cancer research. The Award Types, which include the IDEAs discussed above,
are narrowly targeted. The narrow targeting is designed to jumpstart
underfunded areas of research, encourage creative new thinking, and bring
new investigators into the fight against breast cancer.
On the following pages, we provide statistics on the 50 projects we funded in 2003 by Priority Issue, then by Award Type.
