Supporting the achievement of the goals and objectives of the NCI is an
infrastructure of researchers, research institutions, training, and cancer
surveillance. In this section we briefly outline the components of this
infrastructure for discovery, the funding necessary to continue making advances
against cancer, and examples of cutting-edge research. The budget figures
for FY 1998 reflect a level of support sufficient to maintain the current
discovery infrastructure, but insufficient to fund newly emerging areas
of opportunity. New investment opportunities along with the funding needed
to support them are outlined later in the document.
Research Project Grants
The Nation's researchers
represent the single most valuable resource of our research program. To
foster the creativity of this vital national resource and provide the freedom
to pursue the best ideas that will yield progress against cancer, the NCI
offers researchers throughout the country the opportunity to compete for
research project grants. The main pool of funds expended by the NCI on extramural
research is known as the Research Project Grant (RPG) pool. These dollars
represent those funds competitively awarded through peer review to support
dedicated cancer investigators in hundreds of academic, medical, public,
and private research institutions located in almost every state across the
country. Through more than a dozen different types of individual awards
(averaging four years in duration), the NCI in FY 1996 anticipates expending
nearly $1.06 billion in support of nearly 3,600 separate research projects.
More than 1,000 of these awards will be new projects.
The mainstay of the RPG pool is the single research project grant (designated
R01) awarded to institutions on behalf of individual principal investigators.
The NCI anticipates funding over 1,900 R01 grants in FY 1996 at a total
cost of nearly $500 million. Of these, it is anticipated that at least 600
will be new awards which will undergo an intense competition.
Unfortunately, almost three out of four meritorious applications will
fail to receive funding. Other types of grant awards range in size from
small grants (R03) averaging less than $53,000 per year, to multi-component
program projects (P01) averaging $1.2 million per year that may have more
than a dozen separate research elements.
Collectively, these research project awards span the full range of basic,
clinical, and population-based studies of cancer etiology, biology, prevention,
detection, diagnosis, treatment, and control. These grant awards and the
dedicated researchers behind them constitute the largest single categorical
investment that the NCI, through the extramural research community, commits
annually to combat cancer. The scientific and medical advances that come
from these investments represent the irreplaceable intellectual capital
upon which rests the future of cancer research in this country and the world.
The Single Research Project Grant and its
Derivatives
This research support system has produced many of the most significant
research advances in the NCI portfolio. For example, BRCA1 and BRCA2, the
most significant hereditary genes for breast cancer, were recently discovered
by researchers supported in part by the NCI. The discovery of oncogenes
that lead to cancer and their relationship to cellular genes, which earned
the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, was made through this funding
mechanism and continues to advance under NCI awards.
The discovery of new tumor suppressor genes ("anti-oncogenes")
and their mechanism of action are areas now being explored with substantial
NCI grant support. Most recently, NCI grantees have opened new vistas of
understanding about how cells that sustain DNA damage that might lead to
uncontrolled division can instead be directed either to complete successful
repair, or to self-destruct and die through a process called apoptosis.
These findings, in turn, have provided new insights into mechanisms of drug
action and possible new therapeutic targets. The single project award will
continue to lead to new fundamental discoveries about cancer.
The Program Project Mechanism
The Program Project Grant is an investigator-initiated multi-component
award through which groups of researchers pursuing thematically related
research projects that require additional shared resources such as specialized
core research facilities can be peer reviewed and supported under a single
award. This approach is especially useful in promoting interdisciplinary
and translational research where basic and clinical projects are combined
and where "critical mass" effects lead to synergy between the
investigators.
This type of approach is exemplified by a large program project centered
in Seattle, Washington, that has led the way in developing both basic bone
marrow transplant biology and its clinical application in high-dose chemotherapy
regimens for several different types of cancer. The Nobel Prize for Physiology
or Medicine was awarded in recognition of some of the work performed under
this award. Another program project in Boston, Massachusetts has played
a key role in expanding our understanding of the relationship between blood
vessel formation and solid tumors. This research has materially advanced
knowledge about how vascularization is needed to sustain tumors, and how
this knowledge can be used to inhibit tumor development.
The program project mechanism gives investigators access to a much broader
range of projects and common access to patients and tissue samples that
would be difficult, if not impossible, to arrange in a single project setting.