Nonprofit organizations often need to participate in alliances and coalitions in order to maximize their impact and achieve their mission. Dr. Hurlbert has co-founded, participated in, and led multiple alliances and coalitions. Featured are three examples the Metastatic Breast Cancer (MBC) Alliance, Health Research Alliance, and the International Cancer Research Partnership.
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People living with metastatic breast cancer often feel disconnected from the broader breast cancer movement, which focuses on early detection and stories of survival. A small group of passionate advocates living with MBC — like AIDs activists in the 1980s — demanded in 2013 more accurate numbers from government registries and more research focused on MBC.
This led to the formation of the MBC Alliance to address these knowledge gaps. The first endeavor was a landscape analysis: Changing the Landscape for People Living with Metastatic Breast Cancer.
"Changing the Landscape" identified gaps in research funding, gaps in epidemiological information about how many people were living with MBC, and gaps in education and support services for psychosocial, emotional, and informational needs of patients with MBC.
To address the gaps in epidemiological data in MBC, as inaugural Chair of the MBC Alliance (2013 - 2018), Dr. Hurlbert led a partnership with National Cancer Institute staff scientists utilizing the NCI population registry (named SEER; Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results program). Together they estimated and published that more than 168,000 people are living with MBC in the U.S. today.
The Health Research Alliance (HRA) is a collaborative member organization of nonprofit research funders committed to maximizing the impact of biomedical research to improve human health. HRA today represents 90 foundations who meet frequently to share best-practices in funding biomedical research, aimed to reduce duplication and identify synergies across the sector.
Dr. Hurlbert was elected by his peers to the inaugural HRA board of directors in 2005 and later elected Chairman (2010-2011). He was instrumental in the shift from paper-based to e-grant systems among nonprofit groups. He was also key in the establishment of HRA Analyzer, a database of >60,000 funded grant awards from 95 nonprofit funding organizations totalling $18.3 billion. He remains active in this important coalition to this day.
The ICRP is an active network of cancer research funding organizations working together to enhance global collaboration in cancer research. ICRP maintains the only public source, worldwide, of current and past research grants, totaling more than $80 billion in cancer research since 2000 from 142 international funding organizations.
Dr. Hurlbert has been an active member since 2008 and was elected as ICRP Chairman (2013-2015) by his peers. He has utilized ICRP’s robust grants database to document trends and gaps in research funding for metastatic breast cancer and melanoma.
