© Oxford University Press 2006.
NEWS |
Research Foundations Find Strength in Numbers
Three new $2 million grants for brain cancer research might tend to go unnoticed in the flood of new grant announcements. But this money may represent a sea change in how biomedical research is funded.
The grants were announced in March 2006 by a group of eight private foundations and voluntary health organizations. They are the result of 2 years of intense talks between the funders and prospective grantees about how to change the nature of brain cancer research funding and alleviate logjams that have long plagued the field. The Brain Tumor Funder's Collaborative (BTFC) grew out of a series of workshops for potential brain tumor research sponsors, where experts talked about what they need to advance brain cancer research. The collaborative was born at one of these workshops.
"It was like a light bulb went off over hundreds of people's heads," said Susan Fitzpatrick, Ph.D., vice president of the James S. McDonnell Foundation in St. Louis and one of the participants. "All of us suddenly realized that we are all funding the same people, and we are not making a real difference. We began to understand that the process of science is changing, and the way we fund it needs to change."
After listening to dozens of experts in brain tumor research, the group concluded that no one university or institution has all the pieces in place to really move the field forward. Furthermore, they decided that the traditional grant structure had become insufficient to ensure real progress. They created a new funding mechanism that encouraged multi-institutional and public–private partnerships, as well as setting concrete milestones so funders could measure research progress.
"We will have yearly meetings to assess whether milestones set out by the researchers are being met," said Fitzpatrick. "If they are not, we will see if there are ways we (funders) can collectively put pressure on whatever are the stumbling blocks to move things forward."
This level of engagement is an unusual step by private foundations, which have traditionally let investigators set the agenda and asked only for written progress reports. Funders are beginning to work together on projects of mutual interest, to share data on best practices, and even to pool their money so that they can have a greater impact on what kind of research gets done.
"The message is abundantly clear," said Jeffrey Trent, Ph.D., president and scientific director of the Translational Genomics Research Institute (T-Gen) in Phoenix. "All of us are faced with the increasing cost of doing research, costs that are rarely covered with contracts and grants. All of us are looking at joint programs and large team-based science approaches, because the way science is today, any significant effort requires resources any one institution can't accomplish alone."
Indeed, T-Gen is one of an increasing number of research organizations that is incorporating a new type of grant management model into its day-to-day operation. "The framework we try to function under is a rather rigid process. What we've done is add to the research framework a project management approach with defined milestones," said Trent, whose institute receives funding from a collaborative project (see page 573). "We are starting to get some of the first data from some of the projects run this way, and the data are really encouraging. We realize that not all projects lend themselves to this approach, but even with R-01–type (National Institutes of Health investigator-initiated) grants, there are ways to streamline things."
Brave New Grant World
As the proposed budgets for federally funded cancer research level off, many investigators will turn to private foundations for support. But they may be surprised to discover that foundations are taking a much more active role in setting the research agenda by organizing their own workshops and initiating more critical evaluations of research progress and outcomes.
"As funds become more scarce, evaluation becomes more important," said Nancy Sung, founding chair of the Health Research Alliance, a new organization of health research funders. The group began as a loose assemblage seeking to maximize their impact as endowments shrank in the stock market downturn of 2000–2001, but it has coalesced into an organization that has agreed to share data on whom they fund and how they administer grants. All members must be nonprofit, nongovernmental foundations that fund health research using a peer-review process, usually an external advisory committee that assists the foundation in selecting grant recipients.
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"We discovered there were no venues in which private foundations and voluntary health agencies could meet and discuss their common interests in medical research," said Sung, a senior program officer at the Burroughs Wellcome Fund in Research Triangle Park, N.C. "The stock market downturn motivated us to create efficiencies, share best practices, and really only do that which was most effective. That was the motivator that pulled a lot of us together and made us really listen to one another, maybe more attentively than we had in the past. And now that our endowments are rebounding, but NIH's budget is flat, it gives us an opportunity as a community to think about what are our common goals."
The group's first national meeting, which will be held in Washington, D.C., May 3–4, 2006, will serve as a venue for funders to think about how they can respond to changes in the research climate and to share experiences administering their grant programs. It will also serve as the debut for a new database, called Grants in the Health Research Alliance Shared Portfolio, which attempts to centralize the grant portfolios of more than a dozen major private health research foundations, including the American Cancer Society, the American Association for Cancer Research Foundation, the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation, the Avon Foundation, the American Heart Association, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, among others.
"What we want to try to get at is first, as individual foundations, how do we best quantitate how well our money is doing? Is it going to do the things that we thought it was going to do?" said Jennifer McCafferty, scientific director of the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation in New York. "But on a bigger scale, what [the Research Alliance] is doing, which I think is going to be even more powerful, is the ability to combine datasets among different foundations."
The database, which organizers plan to make available to the public eventually, is intended to help funders analyze trends such as identifying underserved areas, evaluating changes in the average age of investigators on their first award, studying attrition rates among award recipients, and monitoring how often seed funding leads to larger awards.
"It's only, I think, to everyone's benefit to maximize the resources that we each bring to the table and figure out how we can all work together," said Rebecca Garcia, Ph.D., vice president of health sciences at the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation in Dallas, which is not a member of HRA but participates in the International Cancer Research Portfolio, a similar database that centralizes the work of major governmental and nongovernmental cancer research funders in the United States and the United Kingdom.
"We want to reflect on what the government is doing, what are the niches, and where can we collaborate," said T. J. Koerner, Ph.D., director of research information management at the American Cancer Society in Atlanta. "And we intend that we will also track individuals' careers ... so that we can look at the value of career training, which is what a lot of us directly or indirectly do."
For example, the ACS is making forays into prevention and early-detection research, a new area for the organization. Instead of starting from scratch, ACS has partnered with the Canary Fund, a new foundation begun in 2004 by Silicon Valley executive Don Listwin to fund research on prevention and early detection of cancer. As a first step in their partnership, the two groups are funding postdoctoratal fellows as a way to entice young researchers into the area of early-detection research.
"Rather than reinvent a whole granting program, they [the Canary Fund] are partnering with the American Cancer Society to identify candidates and to fund them, but only in the area of early detection," said Koerner. The ACS will use its peer-review process to identify candidates and will jointly investigators.
The Health Research Alliance wants to reach out to new foundations, such as the Canary Fund, formed by private individuals who want to have an impact on biomedical research. According to the Foundation Center, which tracks private foundation giving, nearly 29,000 new private foundations were formed between 1993 and 2003, the most recent year for which statistics are available, with a parallel increase in $287 billion in assets.
"The number of foundations is increasing rapidly," said Sung. "A lot of them are interested in funding biomedical research but don't know how to go about it. We are hoping we can create a venue where they can climb the learning curve a lot faster and make contacts sooner so they can do their work more effectively. Of course, we don't want to say there is only one way to do this; that's why we got together ... I think the philosophy here is that the individuality of the sector is really valuable and we want to take a centralized approach to the information but we don't want to take a centralized approach to funding mechanisms. We don't expect them to all fall in line."
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