New Funding Directions: Building on Our Strengths
To launch the next decade of progress against breast cancer, the California Breast Cancer Research Program
is making significant changes in its approach. “We are moving the
CBCRP forward, to ensure that we make the greatest possible impact on breast
cancer,” states Mhel Kavanaugh-Lynch, M.D., M.P.H, Director of the
CBCRP. “After 10 years of experimenting with multiple approaches
to hasten progress, we are focusing the program, our council, staff, and
research dollars. The target of our focus is based on the strengths of
the CBCRP, the needs of California, and the special opportunities and resources
the state provides.”
In 1993, breast cancer advocates from across California converged on
Sacramento to demand a new breast cancer research funding agency dedicated
to supporting high impact research. From this activism the California Breast
Cancer Research Program was born. Since its inception, the CBCRP has distributed
nearly $150 million for more than 500 grants to more than 60 leading research
institutions throughout California, so that they can investigate ideas
about breast cancer that might not otherwise be explored.
In the past decade, we have served as a model for other research agencies
in terms of innovation, risk-taking in what we
fund, and the involvement of advocacy and community in all phases of our
program. We have pushed breast cancer research in new directions and supported
some of the most innovative breast cancer research in the world, including
examining and reducing access to service barriers for disabled women, rigorously
testing Chinese and Tibetan medicines to treat breast cancer, developing
new technology for the detection of breast cancer, and investigations into
the role of Bovine Leukemia Virus in causing breast cancer.
The CBCRP has devised a strategy that will build on the strengths of the current research program while adding a new dimension of high impact program initiatives. We will continue our successful policy of funding investigator-initiated research that brings more researchers into the breast cancer field and advances the field by pursuing high risk/high payoff research questions. To this end, we will continue offering our IDEA and career development awards. We will reaffirm our commitment to supporting high quality research generated by the community by continuing to support our Community Research Collaboration awards.
In order to maximize our impact on breast cancer, we will forge a complementary path of direct action by initiating programs to tackle research questions that California is uniquely positioned to address. Through an intensive evaluation, we identified three critical research topics that can best be studied in California: the relationship between breast cancer and the environment, uncovering the reasons for the unequal burden of breast cancer, and defining the influence of lifestyle on breast cancer.
California should be able to make headway into these issues because of the extensive infrastructure in place in the state as well as the diversity of its geography and population. Established California databases—such as the California Cancer Registry, the Pesticide Use Report Database, the California Digital Conservation Atlas, the Proposition 65 chemical list, and the Pesticide Illness Surveillance Database—and the regional variations in the California landscape offer an excellent opportunity to investigate the environmental relationship to breast cancer. The racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity in California communities will allow us to investigate the unequal burden of breast cancer and the influence of lifestyle on the disease. Finally because California has a vast research infrastructure involving both academic and for-profit research institutions, the resources are in place to answer these questions.
We have set aside 30 percent of our funding for the next five years, which will result in at least $17 million, to devote to these investigations. With the help of a task force comprised of researchers and advocates from across the country, we will determine how these resources can be leveraged to make the biggest leaps forward in tackling these questions.
