What is unique about these initial six awards — in other words, what distinguishes them from other NCI grants?
Dr. Gomez: We are sponsoring a multidisciplinary group of investigators — a teamwork approach — and have a group of basic and clinical investigators working toward a common intervention that includes prevention, treatment, prognosis, and diagnosis. This is a different approach from individual investigators who are working toward one particular goal. In this partnership, we have teams who are making decisions together to design clinical interventions that affect patients. Will there be more awards made in the future and will the program expand? Dr. Gomez: Initially we targeted our Specialized Programs of Research Excellence, or SPOREs, which focus on organ or disease-specific types of research. We asked nine breast cancer and four ovarian cancer SPOREs to submit grant applications. We targeted only SPOREs to test and implement a system we could expand later on. We are now in the process of expanding this concept with other SPOREs and NCI-designated cancer centers. We hope that by expa
