The CBCRP's Strategy for Funding Research

The CBCRP’s Breast Cancer Research Council and staff set the priorities for the Program’s research funding. This year, the CBCRP has embarked on a new five-year strategy. The goal is to change the course of breast cancer research and to launch the discoveries that will bring an end to this disease.

New Strategy: Five-Year Special Research Initiatives

Starting in 2005, the CBCRP is launching new Special Research Initiatives with the goal of addressing two overlapping questions:

The CBCRP is investing 30 percent of its research funds for the next five years, which will result in at least $17 million for these investigations. With the help of a task force of researchers and advocates from across the nation, the Program is developing a road map to determine how these resources can best be leveraged to make the biggest leaps forward. The CBCRP hopes to engage other partners who will leverage their resources to make more progress possible. The goal is an integrated, coordinated statewide approach to these critical issues that ensures statewide solutions. It is likely that these five-year Special Research Initiatives will unfold via some method other than grants to individual researchers who propose the topics of their research studies.

California is an ideal laboratory for research into the two intertwined issues outlined above. 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. The state’s population is ethnically diverse. California also has communities with the highest rates of breast cancer in the nation.

These new Special Research Initiatives are being launched because the CBCRP’s previous efforts to increase research addressing these questions have not led to enough progress. It is the result of a long, thoughtful, thorough planning process. Prior to launching our research funding strategy, the CBCRP council and staff collected data and information on breast cancer research nationwide. Ten years of CBCRP research grants were also analyzed. The council used this information—along with feedback from breast cancer advocates, researchers, and the public—to set the CBCRP’s plans for the next five to ten years.

New Strategy: Core Funding Efforts are More Focused

After setting aside 30 percent of CBCRP research funds for the new Special Research Initiatives, the remaining 70 percent are being dedicated to challenge investigators to use the funds to maximum effect. During the past ten years, the CBCRP has developed a number of types of awards designed to stimulate innovative research. After analyzing results from the Program’s first ten years, the Program was able to identify the types of research that have the most potential to stimulate rapid progress against breast cancer. The types of awards funded in 2005 include:

As part of the CBCRP’s refined focus, a number of previous CBCRP award types were eliminated this year. These include awards targeted by topic (RFAs), Translational Research Collaborations, Scientific Perspective Research Collaborations, and New Investigator, Training Program, Career Enrichment, and Mentored Scholar awards.

Focusing CBCRP funding on the Program’s most successful award types will lead to further progress in two areas where the CBCRP has previously achieved success. These areas are the leveraging of Program funds to influence the research system nationwide, and enlarging the pool of breast cancer researchers.

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 funding source for breast cancer research in the United States, these funds make up only a small part of the funds granted through the larger system. The CBCRP tries to influence this larger research system to move in new, creative directions.

An example is the CBCRP’s Innovative, Developmental, and Exploratory Awards (IDEAs). These awards were specifically designed to fund 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 nation’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.

If the research funded by an IDEA succeeds, the researcher may well be able to get another research funding agency to fund the next step. For example, in 1997 and 1998 the CBCRP gave Silvia Formenti, M.D., at the University of Southern California, two grants to test a new treatment method for locally advanced breast cancer. With locally advanced breast cancer, the tumor has grown larger than an inch in diameter and spread to the lymph nodes. This diagnosis is more likely to be deadly and is common among minority women with little access to health care. Dr. Formenti’s team gave chemotherapy and radiation before surgery to remove the tumor, instead of after. Her research showed that tumors with certain characteristics are more likely to be treated successfully with chemotherapy and radiation first. The success of Dr. Formenti’s original CBCRP-funded research led to her receiving grants to expand this treatment approach from the federal government’s Centers for Disease Control and Department of Defense, as well as two nonprofit foundations, the New York-based Breast Cancer Research Foundation and the Avon Breast Cancer Foundation. She is now part of a much larger research team testing this new treatment in the U.S. and four other nations.

To get creative new research going, the CBCRP also encourages and trains researchers in California to submit exciting new ideas. In addition, the CBCRP trains 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. A new scoring system was developed to help reviewers read proposals with a perspective toward rewarding high-risk research.

Enlarging the Pool of Breast Cancer Researchers

Another major goal of the CBCRP is to increase the number of talented scientists engaged in breast cancer research. Some of the Program’s grants have allowed researchers to specialize in breast cancer research. For example, the CBCRP awarded Benjamin Cravatt, III, Ph.D., of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, an IDEA grant in 2000. Dr. Cravatt’s research deals with proteomics, investigations into the status of all of the proteins within a cell to discover which changes are associated with breast cancer. The end goal is to find proteins that could be targets for new therapies and also to better distinguish which tumors are more likely to spread to other parts of the body. The research team has made rapid progress. CBCRP funding enabled Dr. Cravatt’s team to specialize in breast cancer research, to explore a novel approach to research, and to collaborate with other scientists to translate his discoveries from the lab toward use in medical treatment.

The CBCRP also enlarges the pool of breast cancer researchers by making Postdoctoral Fellowship and Dissertation awards, which allow new scientists to begin their careers by specializing in breast cancer research. Since its inception the CBCRP has launched over 150 new breast cancer careers through the postdoctoral and dissertation awards.

Funding by Priority Issue and by Award Type

Every research grant funded under the CBCRP’s Core Funding must be responsive in two separate sets of categories, the Priority Issues (research topic) and the Award Types. The Priority Issues are broad, to allow the Program to have an impact across a wide spectrum of breast cancer research. The Award Types, discussed on previous pages, are narrowly targeted to focus CBCRP funding where it will lead to most rapid progress.

Below, two tables present statistics on the 53 projects funded during 2005 by Priority Issue and by Award Type.

2005 Grants Awarded by Priority Issue      
Priority Issue
Number
of Grants
Amount
Percentage of
Total Funding
Community Impact of Breast Cancer
11
$1,060,269
13.7%
Etiology and Prevention
9
$1,269,114
16.4%
Biology of the Breast Cell
24
$3,999,131
51.7%
Detection, Prognosis and Treatment
9
$1,412,328
18.3%


2005 Grants Awarded by Award Type      
Award Type
Number
of Grants
Amount
Percentage of
Total Funding
Dissertation
7
$ 512,305
6.6%
Postdoctoral Fellowship
12
$1,359,047
17.6%
Innovative Developmental
and Exploratory (IDEA)
23
$4,433,641
57.3%
IDEA-Competitive Renewal
2
$ 696,113
9.0%
Community Research Collaboration
(CRC) Pilot Award
7
$ 689,736
8.9%
Joining Forces Conference Award
2
$ 50,000
0.6%