Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs Complement Other Sources of Biomedical Funding
Encouraging Visionary Individuals
The BCRP has developed a series of award mechanisms that seek to identify and fund individuals with potential for, or a history of, extraordinary innovation and creativity at varying career stages, from predoctoral training through established investigators. The BCRP Era of Hope Scholar (EOHS) Award supports early-career researchers who are the best and brightest in their field(s) and therefore have a high potential for innovation in breast cancer research.
While demonstrated experience in forming effective partnerships and collaborations is a requirement, experience in breast cancer is not, encouraging applicants to challenge current dogma and look beyond tradition and convention already established in the field. The unique intent of this mechanism changed the way innovative science is reviewed, since the individual young investigator, rather than the project, is the central feature of this award. The BCRP Innovator Award supports established, visionary individuals, who have demonstrated creativity, innovative work, and leadership in any field. This mechanism also broke new ground by providing individuals with the funding and freedom to pursue their most novel, visionary, high-risk ideas that could ultimately lead to ending disease.
Dr. Greg Hannon of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory received a BCRP New Investigator Award in FY 1995 and was one of the first recipients of the Innovator Award in FY 2001, making scientific breakthroughs in understanding the mechanisms of RNA interference. He is currently applying these discoveries to the identification of new therapeutic targets for breast cancer. By funding such individuals at different stages of their research career, the BCRP has provided the foundation for many of today’s leading breast cancer researchers. Moreover, innovative researchers, such as Dr. Hannon, have moved from other fields into the breast cancer field as a result of BCRP funding.
Another investigator who transitioned into distinct disease fields as a result of CDMRP funding is. From 2002 to 2007, Dr. Chinnaiyan received funding from the PCRP and made a paradigm-shifting discovery and identified multiple recurrent gene fusions in human prostate cancers. Dr. Chinnaiyan had not worked in prostate cancer before embarking on his groundbreaking studies and is now a leader in that field. In 2007, Dr. Chinnaiyan had a vision that characterization of recurrent gene fusions within human breast cancers could lead to the identification of new biomarkers and therapeutic targets for this disease. He was awarded the BCRP EOHS Award and went on to make an exciting discovery of 2 novel recurrent and actionable gene fusions in breast cancer, the results of which were published in 2011.1
Within the CDMRP, the OCRP has adopted the Innovator Award mechanism to attract visionary individuals from any field of research to focus their creativity, innovation, and leadership on ovarian cancer research. Through the use of this mechanism, this program has been successful in funding several noncancer scientists, including engineers, to help solve biomedical problems in the field. Six years after the initial release by CDMRP, the NIH introduced the Director’s New Innovator Award and the Pioneer Award. This CDMRP novel mechanism seems to have transformed funding strategies by encouraging innovative individuals to provide solutions to the toughest medical challenges.
Translation of Science to the Clinic
A critical component in the research continuum is the translation of promising lead agents to clinical trials. The CDMRP programs uniquely address clinical/translational research by focusing on critical needs and specific gaps within a particular disease, condition, or injury rather than a broad investment in general translational research. For example, the PCRP Laboratory-Clinical Transition Award mechanism supports product-driven preclinical studies of promising lead agents or medical devices that have the potential to revolutionize prostate cancer clinical care. For this award mechanism, lead agent development projects generate preclinical data to be used for an FDA investigational device exemption application and/or current Good Manufacturing Practice production of a medical device.
Preclinical Awards
The CDMRP Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) Research Program focuses on the preclinical development of new therapies using the Therapeutic Development Award mechanism, which is product-driven and supports preclinical assessment of therapeutics, and the Therapeutic Idea Award mechanism, which promotes new ideas for novel therapeutics. This preclinical focus on therapeutic development compliments that of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), the major NIH funder of ALS research, which concentrates primarily on funding basic and clinical research.
The CDMRP Gulf War Illness (GWI) Research Program created a unique award mechanism, the Innovative Treatment Evaluation Award, to support the early systematic evaluation of innovative treatment interventions that can provide proof of principle data for broader efficacy trials. The only other major funder of GWI research is the VA Office of Research and Development, which relies on the individual research interests of its intramural investigators.
