NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The National Cancer Institute will fund grants of up to $1 million this year to provide support awards for its cancer centers program, which funds a wide range of research efforts into understanding and treating cancer at numerous research centers.
The grants will support new or renewal awards for up to five years for the Cancer Centers and Comprehensive Cancer Centers programs, which are supposed to be discovery engines for cancer biology and diagnostic and treatment options, to provide shared research resources, and to collaborate and coordinate with other NCI-funded programs and researchers.
The Comprehensive Cancer Centers were created to demonstrate reasonable depth and breadth of studies laboratory, clinical, and population research, and to conduct transdisciplinary efforts that cut across all three areas.
The Cancer Centers are mainly focused on lab research, clinical research, population science research, or some combination of these components.
NCI already has designated a number of Cancer Centers that are conducting a wide array of research, including Baylor College of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, The Wistar Institute, Washington University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and many others.
The objectives of the centers program is to develop shared resources and foster interactive studies by supporting: research programs comprised of investigators with common interests and goals; centralized shared resources providing technology, services, and consultations; strategic planning and evaluation to further the research; pursuit of new collaborations and technologies; and centralized oversight of cancer clinical trials and administrative support.
These centers should be organized to take advantage of institutional capacities in cancer research, and to evaluate strategies and transdisciplinary activities but also to have a defined scientific focus on cancer research, NCI said.