The Transformative Breast Cancer Consortium Award is designed to support collaborations and ideas that will transform the lives of individuals with, and/or at risk for, breast cancer and will significantly accelerate progress toward ending breast cancer. Applicants must bring together different perspectives to develop new paradigms that will solve fundamental yet overarching problems in breast cancer. This award requires a team-based approach by a consortium of exceptional researchers and advocates, whose collaborative efforts will make a transformative impact in breast cancer. The transformation intended by the consortium must be in people’s lives, and not in the healthcare or research system.
The consortium should have at least four, but no more than five, teams investigating different projects under a central hypothesis. No more than two teams may be based at one institution. Each team’s work must be integrated within the consortium so that every component is working toward the consortium’s central hypothesis. Note: This award is not intended to replace, supplement, duplicate, or compete with other collaborative research efforts, such as the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Specialized Programs of Research Excellence (SPOREs), and it should not represent a collection of related Program Project grants or subprojects.
The proposed consortium’s work is expected to be innovative; the Transformative Breast Cancer Consortium Award will include funds for “seed projects” to pursue brand new, high-risk/high-reward concepts during the award period.
Preference will be given to applications that include one or more of the following:
- Different disciplines that come together with one overarching plan to address ending breast cancer with an ecologic approach. An ecologic approach is one that brings together the different perspectives that affect the complexity of breast cancer and their interdependence, or looks at all aspects of the disease and brings together these different perspectives.
- Research that includes truly innovative and brand new paradigms in breast cancer that will address vital issues in a unique way. The issues may be one of the FY20 BCRP Overarching Challenges, the intersection of multiple Overarching Challenges, or with justification, may be a different issue that meets the intent of the award mechanism and addresses the mission of ending breast cancer.
- A plan for a deep, definitive dive into one of the FY20 BCRP Overarching Challenges or a fundamental issue that has not yet been asked or answered in a manner that has not yet been attempted.
Although not all inclusive, applications that propose the following as the primary effort(s) or central hypothesis of the consortium will not meet the intent of this award mechanism:
- NCI Program Project or SPORE grants or applications
- Conducting drug screens or testing a “cocktail” of therapeutics
- Targeting a single gene or protein
- Developing a new derivative or formulation of an old drug
- Conducting genomic landscape mapping analyses
- Seeking to improve existing technologies (e.g., mammography or magnetic resonance imaging [MRI] screening)
Synergistic, highly integrated, multidisciplinary, and multi-institutional research teams of leading scientists, clinicians, and consumer advocates must be assembled into a consortium to address a major problem in a way that could not be accomplished by a single investigator or group. While the teams are made up of different groups, each with its own Principal Investigator (PI), the teams must be working on the major problem identified in the Transformative Breast Cancer Consortium Award application and under the leadership of the Consortium Director. The research proposed in Transformative Breast Cancer Consortium Award applications may include Phase I clinical trials and collaborations with pharmaceutical or biotechnology industry scientists and/or companies, as appropriate. However, a clinical trial is not required, and the primary thrust of application should not be a clinical trial.