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. The CBCRP strategy for funding research has two parts, the Special Research Initiatives and Core Funding.

Five-Year Special Research Initiatives

The CBCRP's Special Research Initiatives address two overlapping questions:

The CBCRP launched the Special Research Initiatives in 2005 because the Program's previous efforts to increase research addressing these questions have not led to enough progress. The initiatives are the result of a long, thoughtful, thorough planning process that included analyzing years of nationwide and CBCRP-funded breast cancer research, and collecting feedback from breast cancer advocates, researchers, and the public.

The CBCRP is investing 30 percent of its research funds over five years, which will result in at least $18 million for these investigations.

To select the research that will lead to the most progress against breast cancer, the Program is following a carefully-crafted, two-year, publicly-accessible strategy development process. A steering committee of researchers and advocates from across the nation was recruited during 2006 and is guiding this process of developing strategy. The members of this committee include:

The CBCRP's director, Marion H.E. Kavanaugh-Lynch, also serves on the steering committee.

The process of developing strategy moved forward during 2006. The CBCRP drafted a review of previous research into the impact of the environment on breast cancer and the reasons why some groups of women bear a greater burden of the disease. A 30-member strategy team of scientists, advocates and clinicians from California and across the nation was also recruited during 2006. During 2007, the CBCRP will gather input from women affected by breast cancer, investigators who may conduct future research under the initiatives, clinicians, government officials, and interested members of the public across California. The strategy team will use this input to make specific recommendations for research to be funded.

This two-year process for developing strategy is being followed because the questions selected for investigation hold great promise for progress against breast cancer, but they are also difficult to research. There's no scientific consensus on where to begin. Information about previous research into these questions is only available through widely scattered sources.

The CBCRP's strategy development process is designed to avoid duplicating previous research and to base the Program's efforts on the most up-to-date knowledge and on the opinions of experts nationwide. The process allows time to make the best use of the state's resources by identifying and involving California institutions and organizations who can join forces to make progress against breast cancer. The goal is an integrated, coordinated statewide approach 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 environment's role in breast cancer and the reasons why some groups of women bear an unequal burden of the disease. 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.

Core Funding

After setting aside 30 percent of CBCRP research funds for the Special Research Initiatives, the remaining 70 percent is dedicated to challenging investigators to use the funds to maximum effect. During its thirteen-year history, the CBCRP has developed and fine-tuned a funding strategy designed to stimulate innovative research.

Each research project must fall under one of the CBCRP's Priority Issue areas:

Each research project must also qualify as one of the CBCRP types of awards:

During 2006, the CBCRP launched a new type of award, inviting applications for grants the Program will make during 2007. The Translational Research Award is an effort to stimulate research that will take basic science findings quickly toward treatment, diagnosis, prevention or another application that can directly impact breast cancer, either in a medical clinic setting or through a public health measure. Translational Research is funded for a maximum of 3 years, for up to $750,000. This award replaces the CBCRP's previous Translational Research Collaboration Award, which was a mixed success. The requirements have been altered to stimulate research that moves most directly and quickly toward applications that will create progress against breast cancer.

Two goals underlying the CBCRP's funding strategy 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 California, 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 investigators to specialize in, or concentrate much of their efforts on, breast cancer research. For example, the CBCRP awarded Brunhilde Felding-Habermann, Ph.D., of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, an IDEA grant in 1999. She investigates how breast cancer cells move through the body to form tumors in the brain. Dr. Felding-Habermann's investigations began with basic research on proteins that are critical to the cells' being able to move and spread (metastasize). CBCRP funding has enabled Dr. Felding-Habermann to collaborate with other researchers to translate her basic research into a possible treatment that would deliver cancer-inhibiting protein fragments to the brain through the nose. CBCRP funding is also allowing her to research how stem cells found in tumors are involved in breast cancer metastasis, and to investigate brain stem cells as possible delivery agents of therapy to target breast cancer that has spread to the brain.

The CBCRP also makes it possible for new scientists to begin their careers as specialists in breast cancer research, by making Postdoctoral Fellowship and Dissertation awards. Since the CBCRP's inception, the Program's Postdoctoral and Dissertation awards have launched over 200 new breast cancer research careers.

Funding by Priority Issue and by Award Type

Every research grant funded under the CBCRP’s Core Funding must fit within 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 49 of the 53 projects funded during 2006 by Priority Issue and by Award Type.

Table 5. 2006 Grants Awarded by Priority Issue

      
Priority Issue
Number
of Grants
Amount
Percentage of
Total Funding
Community Impact of Breast Cancer
18
$3,172,432
32.3%
Etiology and Prevention
3
$797,337
8.1%
Biology of the Breast Cell
15
$2,331,263
23.7%
Detection, Prognosis and Treatment
17
$3,527,297
35.9%

Totals
53
$9,828,329
100%

Table 6. 2006 Grants Awarded by Award Type
Award Type
Number
of Grants
Amount
Percentage of
Total Funding
Dissertation
7
 $497,985
5.1%
Postdoctoral Fellowship
8
 $945,000
9.6%
Innovative Developmental and Exploratory (IDEA)
22
 $5,049,387
51.4%
IDEA-Competitive Renewal
1
 $464,750
4.7%
Community Research Collaboration (CRC) Pilot Award
8
 $1,459,235
14.8%
Community Research Collaboration (CRC) Full Award
2
 $1,347,272
13.7%
Joining Forces Conference Award
1
 $24,700
0.3%
Planning Grants
4
 $40,000
0.4%

Totals
53
 $9,828,329
100%