NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The National Institutes of Health is seeking to fund research into the causes and mechanisms involved in cancer health disparities, including gene expression and epigenetic studies and polymorphism research, through two new grant programs.
The programs are aimed at supporting the creation of a cohort of researchers with a high level of basic research expertise in cancer health disparities and to support them as they pursue additional funding.
The Exploratory/Developmental grants will support research for up to two years with budgets of up to $275,000 over two years and up to $200,000 in one year.
A second program, under the NIH Cooperative Agreement grants, will fund programs for five years or less with up to $250,000 per year.
The studies, which are funded by the Center to Reduce Cancer Health Disparities and the Division of Cancer Biology (DCB) at the National Cancer Institute, should focus on basic cancer research and cancer health disparities and support the DCB's research interests. These interests include research into cancer cell biology, cancer etiology, cancer immunology and hematology, DNA and chromosome aberrations, structural biology, and the tumor microenvironment.
The CRCHD aims to support cancer health disparity research focused on basic, hypothesis-driven studies that focus on the burden of cancer amongst racial and ethnic minorities or other underserved populations, and includes prevention, early detection, diagnosis, treatment, and survivorship studies.
The research that scientists may apply to pursue include: genetic and epigenetic susceptibility differences between ethnic populations; examinations of differences in gene expression profiles in triple negative breast tumors in African-American women; studies of polymorphisms in liver detoxification enzymes; and new animal and cell culture models and systems for investigating cancer disparities.