Developmental Funds

Ohio State University, Columbus OH

Investigators

Linked publications, trials & patents

Abstract

10.5 DEVELOPMENTAL FUNDS Developmental Funds are critical to the future progress of the OSUCCC. During the prior funding period, the OSUCCC benefited from $1,858,197 in CCSG developmental funds. For the $1,308,482 of CCSG dollars used for faculty recruitment, the return to date in total direct costs for CCSG-approved peer-reviewed extramural funding is $ 28,576,879 (22:1 return on investment), and in total funding was $72,421,123 (55:1 return on investment, Table 1). In addition, we used CCSG funds for establishment of two shared resources, the Microarray Shared Resource and the Real Time PCR Shared Resource. A brief summary of the progress with these two facilities is described below, because their operation as fully established shared resources is described elsewhere in this application. In the 1999 CCSG competing renewal, "Developmental Funds" received a merit descriptor of "excellent". It was noted that there was no letter of assurance from the University attesting to the statement that developmental funds would be matched on a 10:1 basis, nor was there a clear outline of just how or in what form the University funds would be provided in supplementing the developmental funds. There were additional concerns that the junior to mid-level positions to be recruited during the last two years of the grant period were inadequate in description. Finally, there were concerns that the recruitment of a research mammographer might not be possible without a more research-oriented climate in radiology. In the present application, we provide evidence that the University is now providing the new OSUCCC Director with over $9 M/year in funds, an increase of over $8.5 M/year since our last competitive renewal. These dollars are to be used entirely to continue to develop the cancer program at OSU and as such, are matching to any CCSG dollars provided for this purpose. Written assurance of this $9 M/year commitment from both the OSU President and the Senior Vice President for Health Sciences is provided in section 6.7 of Essential Characteristics. In the present application we have tried to provide a more complete description of all 11 faculty we intend to recruit with CCSG developmental funds. In response to the concerns of first establishing a research environment in imaging prior recruiting a research mammographer, we first invested in recruiting a world-class imaging researcher who has initiated the development of a palpable research program in radiology, now making it more suitable to pursue additional imaging investigators. We are requesting support for continued faculty recruitment and continued shared resource development. We propose to focus our recruitment on 11 new faculty: two in the area of cancer prevention and control, three in basic or translational aspects on solid tumor oncology (breast, gastrointestinal, and prostate), one faculty member for each of biostatistics, pathology and human imaging research and three basic researchers in human cancer genetics. We request CCSG funds to develop three new shared resources (SR): a small animal imaging SR, a pharmacoanalytical SR and a cancer biomedical informatics SR. Both our Internal and External Scientific Advisors believe that strategically directed recruitment and SR development are the two best ways to continue to use new developmental funds, given the success with these funds to date and the resultant growth of the OSUCCC over the past 4 years. In Section 10.5.2, we describe our request for developmental funds for the next funding period. Section 10.5.3 describes the resources available to the OSUCCC to supplement the requested `$1 M annually in developmental funds. Our request represents less than 25% of our total annual direct CCSG request.