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Cancer Control Research

Abstract

DESCRIPTION: (Applicant's Description) This TTURC proposal targets relapse to tobacco use. The justification for this concentration is that relapse is the central, unanswered challenge to tobacco researchers today: no effective relapse prevention programs exist and relapse consistently claims the majority of smokers who achieve abstinence. This TTURC proposal describes a transdisciplinary effort to uncover new and important information relevant to tobacco control, achieve wide-spread dissemination and use of such information, sow the seeds for future innovative and transdisciplinary tobacco research, encourage new researchers from diverse backgrounds to enter the field of tobacco science, and to facilitate their training. In sum, the over-arching goals are to create and foster new and integrative research in tobacco control, attract outstanding students and scientists into the field of tobacco research, and train them to become outstanding tobacco scientists. The TTURC will achieve its goals through the conduct of three large research projects, a pilot grant research program, a transdisciplinary career development program, and an administrative core. One of the large research projects will develop a novel, computerized relapse prevention strategy, the second will develop a new measure of tobacco dependence and relate it to relapse, and the third will use real-time recording to study how treatment affects relapse likelihood. The pilot grant program will support innovative and promising studies relevant to relapse prevention, and will actively offer collaborative opportunities and support to outstanding scientists who are new to tobacco research. The career development program is designed to attract individuals from diverse backgrounds and train them in state-of-the-art tobacco science. All of these elements reflect three central themes of characteristics: they are: transdisciplinary, they are focused on relapse, and the different perspectives and data yielded by the transdisciplinary approach will be integrated to achieve a deeper understanding of relapse and relapse prevention. Transdisciplinary contributions will be promoted by involving a wide range of individuals, launching research projects that require novel or innovative collaborations, and by building in structures that prompt and reinforce breadth in research and training activities.