About the California Breast Cancer Research Program
Making California a Leader Among States
In 1993, California breast cancer activists joined forces with scientists, clinicians, state legislators, and University of California officials to propel the state into national leadership for breast cancer research.
The activists, most of them women who had survived or currently had breast cancer, were impatient with the slow pace of progress against the disease. With their allies, they wrote and won passage of statewide legislation to push breast cancer research in new, creative directions. The California Breast Cancer Act, sponsored by then-Assemblywoman Barbara Friedman, raised the tobacco tax by two cents a pack, with 45 percent of the proceeds going to the California Breast Cancer Research Program (CBCRP), which is administered as a public service by the University of California.
Since then, the CBCRP has continued to make California a leader among states by becoming the largest, most stable state-funded breast cancer research effort in the nation.
The mission of the CBCRP is to eliminate breast cancer by leading innovation in research, communication, and collaboration among California’s lay and scientific communities.
Since 1993, the CBCRP has awarded 860 grants to 98 scientific institutions and community entities, totaling over $205 million for research in California to prevent, treat, and cure breast cancer. In 2009, the CBCRP awarded nearly $16 million for 53 single- and multiple-year research projects at 22 California institutions.
The CBCRP is funded primarily by the tobacco tax, a steadily declining source of revenue due to decreasing consumption of tobacco products. This funding is supplemented with taxpayer donations contributed through state income tax forms. The CBCRP also receives private contributions.
Pushing the Research Boundaries
During its fifteen-year history, the CBCRP has established a record for filling gaps not covered by other research funders, jump-starting new areas of research, and fostering new types of collaboration. Now the Program is challenging itself to focus its resources on questions that could change the face of breast cancer research.
The CBCRP’s Special Research Initiatives (SRI) are investigating two interconnected research areas that have long received little attention from traditional private and federal research funding sources:
- The environment's role in breast cancer
- The reasons why some groups of women are more likely to get or die from breast cancer, based on characteristics that include race and ethnicity
The CBCRP's Special Research Initiatives were developed through a thorough and thoughtful process. The process included evaluating the impact of the Program's past research projects and gathering input from scientific experts and breast cancer advocates from across the nation. The result of this process is new research into questions that are difficult to investigate, but hold great promise for progress against breast cancer. During 2009, the CBCRP began setting funding priorities for the coming five years. The Program is using a similar thorough and thoughtful process to set priorities in order to target the CBCRP's research dollars into investigations that will do the most to bring an end to this disease. For more on the CBCRP's priority-setting process, see the section titled "The CBCRP's Strategy for Allocating Research Funds" in this annual report.
In recognition of the Program's leadership in funding innovative breast cancer research, the Dr. Susan Love Foundation honored the CBCRP with the 2009 Dr. Otto W. Sartorius Humanitarian Award for Excellence in Philanthropy.
A Structure That Encourages Public Input
The CBCRP’s structure has set a standard for community involvement that has inspired similar changes in other research funding agencies around the nation. Through example, the CBCRP is encouraging other agencies to include community advocates in the review of research proposals and to involve community members in the design and conduct of research. Breast cancer advocates play a critical role in every aspect of the CBCRP’s work, from setting research priorities to recommending research projects for funding to getting out the word about research results.
The CBCRP is under the administration of the University of California, Office of the President, in Oakland, with a staff managing the solicitation, review, award, and oversight of grants and dissemination of research results.
The CBCRP’s 16-member Breast Cancer Research Council includes scientists, clinicians, representatives of industry and nonprofit health organizations, and breast cancer advocates. The council provides vision, sets research priorities, and determines how the CBCRP invests its funds in research. It also conducts one of the two reviews that every proposal must pass to receive funding. The council reviews research proposals for relevance to the CBCRP’s goals, while teams of research scientists and breast cancer advocates from outside California review all proposals for scientific merit.
In addition, all Californians concerned about breast cancer have opportunities to help set the research agenda via several avenues of feedback created by the Program. The Program’s research symposia bring the scientific and treatment communities into dialog with a broader range of the public than is common at such conferences. Each symposium includes a session for members of the public to provide feedback on the Program’s work and suggest research priorities. The Program’s Special Research Initiatives included several opportunities for the public to take part in identifying and prioritizing the questions to be investigated. During 2009, as part of the CBCRP's strategic planning process to set priorities for the next five years, the Program contacted funded researchers and interested members of the public. Everyone was invited to take part in a confidential online survey that will be used to help decide what kind of breast cancer research should be funded in the future. The CBCRP also encourages public review of its funded research through its annual reports and the Program’s Web site (www.CABreastCancer.org), where members of the public can leave written comments.
By bringing the research, advocacy, and treatment communities into closer collaboration, the California Breast Cancer Research Program pushes the boundaries of research, mobilizing greater creativity and resources toward decreasing—and ending—the suffering and death caused by breast cancer.
