Break Through Cancer awards $50M to fund ‘radical collaboration’ in cancer research
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Break Through Cancer will award $50 million in grants designed to maximize interdisciplinary collaboration among researchers at five top cancer centers.
The funding will support research into glioblastoma, ovarian cancer and pancreatic cancer conducted at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
A “TeamLab” approach is intended to overcome traditional barriers to multi-institution teamwork, implementing advanced analytics for real-time data sharing, umbrella contractual agreements that minimize administrative burdens, and policies related to authorship and intellectual property.
“Break Through Cancer and its partner institutions are reducing the siloes in the academic research system as never before,” Tyler Jacks, PhD, president of Break Through Cancer, said in a press release. “In just 1 year’s time, we have built an expansive and impressive community of leading cancer researchers and physicians who can now work as one to accelerate the pace of discovery. This model of radical collaboration will empower many of the brightest minds in cancer research and maximize the capabilities of partner institutions.”
The grants will fund four research projects for an initial 3-year period. The research projects are designed to:
- increase awareness of and access to opportunistic salpingectomy to reduce ovarian cancer incidence;
- better understand and target minimal residual disease in ovarian cancer;
- assess the safety and feasibility of serial biopsies of glioblastoma and evaluate whether samples of blood or cerebrospinal fluid can provide surrogate markers of drug activity; and
- integrate clinical and laboratory approaches to determine why patients with pancreatic cancer and KRAS alterations do or do not respond to targeted therapies, and develop pharmaceutical partnerships to accelerate the translation of new KRAS inhibitors into effective drugs for this patient population.
This project will be supported in partnership with Lustgarten Foundation.
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