A Public-Private Cancer Funder Backs Team Science and Targets Inequities in Care and Outcomes
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A set of sizable recent grants from Cancer Grand Challenges — a deep-pocketed global research funder — puts the focus on two areas of medical research increasingly common in philanthropic funding: cooperative team science and equity in healthcare.
Cancer Grand Challenges, cofounded in 2020 by the U.S. National Cancer Institute and the charitable organization Cancer Research UK, brought together two of the world's biggest funders of cancer research specifically to take on challenges in cancer science that are too big for any single scientist, scientific discipline, research institution or even country to solve alone.
Cancer Grand Challenges recently announced grants totaling $125 million across five global research teams to advance understanding of historically important and emerging cancer challenges. Each research team will receive up to $25 million over five years, uniting researchers from different countries and various scientific disciplines in cooperative research projects. It’s largest funding round since the organization’s establishment, with $50 million of the funding coming from the NCI and $75 million from Cancer Research UK and its funding partners. Awards went to research teams based in the U.S. and Germany.
Areas that the teams will study include early-onset colorectal cancers, which are occurring in growing numbers globally in people under 50. Teams led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital and Washington University in St. Louis will study why these early-onset cancers emerge and how to reverse the factors that lead to disease.
Two teams — led by investigators at Hopp Children's Cancer Center in Heidelberg and University of Würzburg, both in Germany, and at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia — will focus on solid tumors in children. Though cancer is rare in children, it is still the second-leading cause of death for kids after accidents. And although childhood cancer outcomes overall have improved greatly in recent decades as a result of scientific advances, treatments and outcomes for solid tumor cancers have not improved much in 30 years, according to Cancer Grand Challenges. Funded teams will use an emerging strategy called protein degradation to develop new drugs to treat such solid tumor cancers.
Another grantee will dig deeper into the factors that have driven longstanding inequities in cancer outcomes among minority populations. A team led by an investigator at Morehouse School of Medicine, at the famed Atlanta-based historically Black institution, will study discrepancies in cancer prevention, screening and treatment that have long led to increased incidence of cancer and mortality for Black communities in the U.S. and around the word. The research team will assemble a comprehensive set of measurements of social, environmental, genetic and biological factors to define the causes of disparate outcomes. The team will focus on prostate, breast and pancreatic cancers in the global African diaspora.
As mentioned above, philanthropy has been increasingly exploring matters of policy and other factors that have been driving inequities in health outcomes, including in cancer. Susan G. Komen and the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society are two such cancer-oriented organizations working actively to understand socioeconomic, policy and behavioral factors that contribute to disparities in outcomes across diverse populations and communities.
Another of the funded teams will study T cells and their role in the immune response, to advance the field of immunotherapies, which have provided significant improvements in patient outcome for certain types of cancer. However, these immunotherapies have different success rates from patient to patient, and researchers and doctors don't yet understand why. This MIT-led research team aims to determine how T cells and immune systems respond to cancers. And since the immune system is central to so many areas of disease and health, such knowledge could have important implications beyond cancer, potentially impacting infectious and autoimmune diseases, and allergies.
Philanthropy has long played an important role in cancer research funding, as IP has often noted. But going forward, that support may even grow, perhaps in total amount but also in relative importance, as government funding remains mostly flat. The U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI), for example, has long been the world's largest funder of cancer research; its budget for 2024 is $7.3 billion, and while that's quite a significant amount, it's the same as the 2023 funding level. It's not possible to know at what level the government will back the NCI and other public research funding agencies in future, but if public funding fails to increase significantly from year to year, philanthropic dollars will only be more crucial to the research community and to the physicians and other providers that care for cancer patients.
For a deeper and more detailed report on philanthropic support for cancer-related issues, we urge you to read "Giving for Cancer Research," written by Inside Philanthropy's Mike Scutari — it's a recent addition to the State of American Philanthropy, our series of deep dives into philanthropic funding.
It may be tempting to feel pessimistic about the fight against cancer, given the amount of suffering that people still endure, but that doesn't mean there hasn't been truly significant progress. One cancer specialist told me that even in the last 10 years — a short time for health research — advances in treatments have radically improved outcomes for many cancer patients, adding years to their lives, sometimes even curing people of diseases that only recently were likely death sentences. While important breakthroughs can and do emerge from single teams, the complexity of conditions like cancer — commonly the result of a combination of factors, from genetics to economic status — really do require cooperative, interdisciplinary global research.
