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NCI's Participation in the NIH Roadmap
NCI actively participates in the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research, supporting and providing leadership and expertise to many important research initiatives.
- New Pathways to Discovery: Investments in molecular libraries and imaging, structural biology, nanomedicine, and bio-informatics and computational biology are advancing the cancer research agenda.
- NCI is leading the development of the Comprehensive Trans-NIH Molecular Imaging and Contrast Database (MICAD), a resource that will facilitate more rapid development of cancer imaging agents and provide oncologists with an efficient resource on all imaging agents for diagnosing cancer and monitoring treatment.
- NCI is managing one of the centers created by the NIH Roadmap National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NCBCs), an initiative designed to create a computational infrastructure for biomedical computing in the nation. Moreover, NCI has developed a complementary multidisciplinary computational models program through the NCI Integrative Cancer Biology Program.
- The NIH Roadmap program on Epigenomics intends to transform biomedical research through the development of publicly comprehensive reference epigenome maps, identification of new epigenetic marks, and the development of new technologies for comprehensive epigenomic analyses. In addition, NCI and the NIH Roadmap program will co-sponsor research projects designed to leverage the new information and methodologies developed through the program toward understanding the epigenetic contributions to cancer development. NCI staff members are active participants in the development of the five interrelated initiatives developed under this program.
- The NIH Roadmap Human Microbiome Project (HMP) aims to develop new approaches in data collecting, identifying, and cataloging technologies to examine associated microbiota in control and diseases epithelia tissues. The majority of cancers arise among epithelial tissues that are exposed to the microbial world. Once these technologies are mature, they will provide innovative predictive and exploratory platforms for cancer biologists to utilize in determining associations of microbiota in cancer development
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Research Teams of the Future: Developing interdisciplinary research teams of the future is critical to progress in cancer research.
- Since its creation, several NCI grantees have been recipients of the NIH Director Pioneer Award, an award to support exceptionally creative scientists who take innovative approaches to major challenges in biomedical research.
- NIH is funding nine interdisciplinary research consortia as a means of integrating aspects of different disciplines to address health challenges that have been resistant to traditional research approaches. Interdisciplinary research integrates elements of a wide range of disciplines, including basic research, clinical research, behavioral biology, and social sciences providing the scientist the opportunity to approach the problem in new ways. Three of the nine consortia (Northwest Genome Engineering Consortium, Genomic Based Drug Discovery, and the Oncofertility Consortia) focus on areas important to cancer.
- Re-engineering the Clinical Research Enterprise: This NIH Roadmap effort is addressing the need to build better integrated networks and academic centers linked to community-based health care providers.
- The NIH Roadmap initiative Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) is a publicly available Web-based resource currently under development that can be used to measure key health symptoms and health related quality of life (HRQL) domains such as pain, fatigue, depression, cognitive function, and illness impact. This project, in which NCI has had significant involvement, is a step forward to improving our ability to measure the burden of cancer and to identify effective treatments to reduce pain and suffering.
- The Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSAs), created to accelerate the translation of basic discoveries into improved therapies and clinical practice, to a large extent parallel the organization and philosophy of the NCI cancer center program.
- The NCI clinical trials system has been a model for many research institutions in clinical and translational research.
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