About the California Breast Cancer Research Program

California Takes National Breast Cancer Research
Leadership

The CBCRP’s mission is to eliminate breast cancer by leading innovation in research, communication, and collaboration among California’s lay and scientific communities.

Established by the California Legislature with passage of the 1993 Breast Cancer Act, the CBCRP was created because California breast cancer activists were impatient with the slow pace of progress against the disease. Together with scientists, clinicians, state legislators, and University of California officials, they wrote legislation that created a program to fund cutting-edge breast cancer research in California.

Since then, the CBCRP has made California a leader among states for breast cancer research. The Program is the largest, most stable state-funded breast cancer research effort in the nation. Since 1993, the CBCRP has awarded 894 grants to 101 scientific institutions and community entities, totaling more than $215 million for research in California to prevent, treat, and cure breast cancer. In 2010, the CBCRP awarded nearly $17 million for 37 single- and multiple-year research projects at 18 California institutions.

The CBCRP is administered as a public service by the University of California. The CBCRP’s staff manages the solicitation, review, award, and oversight of grants and dissemination of research results, working under the administration of the University of California, Office of the President, in Oakland.

Funding for the CBCRP comes primarily from a state tax on tobacco, 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 and by private contributions. Ninety-five percent of our revenue goes directly to funding research and education efforts.

Funding Innovative Research

During our sixteen-year history, the CBCRP has established a record for funding innovative research ideas that have led to successes that include a Nobel Prize, and for fostering collaborations between members of California’s diverse communities and scientific researchers.

Going forward, the Program is poised to develop the innovative foundations that we have laid. Half of the CBCRP’s funding will go toward program initiated research, building on the success of the 2004 Special Research Initiatives (SRI). The program initiated research will be devoted to investigating three interconnected research areas that have long received little attention from traditional private and federal research funding sources:

During 2009 and 2010, the CBCRP funded cutting-edge investigations into the first two of the three research areas listed above. For the future, we are adding breast cancer prevention research that will include population-level interventions, interventions for high-risk women and men, and better methods to assess risk.

The other half of the CBCRP’s research funds will be focused on areas where the Program has historically had great impact. These include funding to launch new research on innovative concepts, and collaborations between scientists and community members. For more on the way the CBCRP allocates our research funds, see the section titled “The CBCRP’s Strategy for Allocating Research Funds” in this annual report.

Structured to Welcome Public Input

From the beginning, the CBCRP has been structured to welcome and encourage community involvement. Breast cancer advocates, who sparked the creation of the Program, continue to 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 Program's structure has inspired other research funding agencies around the nation to follow the CBCRP's example. Other agencies are now more likely to include community advocates in the review of research proposals and to involve community members in the design and conduct of research.

The CBCRP’s 16-member Breast Cancer Research Council is the Program's highest decision-making body. It includes scientists, clinicians, representatives of industry and nonprofit health organizations, and breast cancer advocates serving overlapping three-year terms. The council provides vision, sets research priorities, and determines how the CBCRP invests funds in research. The council also conducts one of the two reviews that every proposal must pass to receive funding. Council members review 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.

All Californians concerned about breast cancer also have opportunities to help set the research agenda via several avenues of feedback created by the Program. The CBCRP’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 development of program initiated research strategies included opportunities for the public to take part in identifying and prioritizing questions to be investigated. During 2010, the CBCRP embarked on a new funding strategy for the coming five years. The planning process to develop this new strategy included collecting feedback from researchers, service providers, and interested members of the public. We also encourage public review of our funded research through our annual reports and the CBCRP Web site (www.CABreastCancer.org) and social media pages, 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.