Obtaining competitive, peer-reviewed grant funding is a challenge for many of the best and brightest scientists trying to cure cancer, heart disease, practically any disease, or conducting fundamental biological research. Federal funding from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the largest source of funds for academic researchers. NIH funding is difficult to secure, with typically less than 20% of the proposed concepts submitted (‘grant proposals’) approved for funding (https://www.niaid.nih.gov/grants-contracts/fy-2020-award-data).
Data about the grant proposals that have been funded can help researchers:
- Understand what their peers in their field are studying
- Help funding agencies monitor trends and identify gaps
- Enable identification of possible synergies orcollaborations, while potentially reducing any unnecessary duplication
In cancer, we are fortunate to have the International Cancer Research Partnership (ICRP), an alliance started in 2000 that today in 2021 includes more than 140 cancer research funding organizations from around the globe. ICRP maintains a public source of current and past grant awards which total more than $80 billion US dollars in cancer research funding since 2000.
Trends in Cancer Research Funding
My colleagues in ICRP Kari Wojtanik (of Susan G. Komen), Rachel Abudu (of London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine), Lynne Davies (ICRP), myself and others, recently published a comprehensive analysis of cancer research grant funding in JCO Global Oncology, An American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Journal. The paper, entitled Trends in International Cancer Research Investment 2006-2018, represents the most comprehensive analysis of cancer grant funding, to our knowledge, examining data from 2006 and 2018.
Our study found that research grants in two categories, (i)Treatment and (ii) Early Detection, Diagnosis and Prognosis, increased from 2006 to 2018 in both absolute terms and as a proportion of the portfolio. During the same time period, research funding in both Biology and Etiology declined.
While difficult to know the exact ‘cause and effect’ for changes in the funding totals, we hypothesize an overall shift from basic biology and etiology, to translational research focused on early detection and treatment research. This shift of focus to translational research could be the result of progress in basic science and our improved understanding of cancer biology, etiology, and identification of the critical pathways that initiate and sustain a cancer cell.
The ICRP partners’ database:
- Includes individual project-level funding data coded to the Common Scientific Outline (CSO)
- Project level allocation to percent relevant to cancer site (e.g. breast, skin-melanoma, lung), where applicable
- Is a unique resource to access cancer research grant data
The CSO is an ontology developed by the scientific staff of NIH, DOD and biomedical research funding charities involved with the ICRP. The CSO enables organizations to code grants in the same manner, and allow comparisons like apples-to-apples, oranges-to-oranges. The ICRP database includes NIH, Department of Defense –Congressionally-Directed Medical Research Program (DOD CDMRP), the medical research council of other countries, and the largest cancer research funding charities (nonprofit organizations) from around the globe.
Past Efforts to Track Grant Funding
The idea of coding biomedical research grant funding in a common ontology, and sharing in a public database, is not unique to cancer. As a public funding agency, NIH funded by American tax-payers, there is a demand for transparency and public accessibility to grant data. In the 1980’s, NIH developed the CRISP (Computer Retrieval of Information on Scientific Projects) database with grant funding records dating back to 1972 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC227292/). In 2009, NIH released a more modernized public grant database and tracking system, called NIH RePORTER (https://reporter.nih.gov/).
Around the time the cancer community was discussing the creation of the ICRP database in the late 1990s, a coalition of nonprofit, non-governmental biomedical funding agencies began to meet and discuss how they could work together to shape the future of biomedical research. Following meetings every two years from 1998 through 2004, the group decided to formally incorporate as the Health Research Alliance (HRA). Among the early discussions was the idea of a shared grants database.
HRA is a coalition of basic biomedical research funding organizations like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Burroughs Wellcome Fund, as well as the largest disease-specific organizations including the American Cancer Society (ACS), American Diabetes Association (ADA), American Heart Association (AHA), Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF), Susan G. Komen, among several others. HRA created the gHRAsp (Grants in the HRA Shared Portfolio) database.
Many nonprofit scientific staff find value to both ICRP and HRA databases to analyze grant funding information. ICRP provides a well-curated dataset that is known to be cancer related, while HRA’s gHRAsp includes, grant awards that could be funded by a heart disease or diabetes nonprofit, but have similar cellular pathways or genes being studied both within cancer and other areas of biomedical research.
The Future of Grant Funding Information
I envision a future with the creation of a ‘knowledge base’, where grant funding information is linked to conference presentations, publications, patents and other tangible outcomes. This linkage is already available, to some extent, in NIH RePORTER. HRA and ICRP organizations both continue to add functionality and capabilities to link the products of research (papers, patents, knowledge) to the grant awards that supported the research, either in whole or in part.
A ‘knowledge base’ integrating ideas and hypotheses (grant proposals) and research results testing those ideas (presentations, publications, patents) could help accelerate biomedical research. An open-access knowledge base could help researchers see what has already been done on a specific molecular target or cellular pathway, and better enable funding agencies to strategically invest in areas where there are gaps.