Infrastructure Needed for Cancer Research: NCI's Challenge

Introduction

We are entering the 21st century with ever-expanding knowledge and an array of sophisticated tools for continuing the fight against cancer. The challenge before NCI is to build and continually enhance a research system that will allow the scientific community to apply new discoveries and emerging technologies.

• We need mechanisms that will promote and reward innovative thinking, aid cross-fertilization of ideas among disparate scientific disciplines and enhance collaborations among government, academia, and industry.
• We must develop and maintain a cadre of trained scientists from a variety of disciplines.
• And we must address special societal concerns and other barriers that jeopardize our Nation's ability to provide the best possible treatment to cancer patients, ensure equal access to information and care, and offer current and future scientists sufficient opportunities to obtain research funding and other kinds of support.

NCI must provide the vision, creative environments, and diverse resources needed to ensure an easy flow between the increasing number of discoveries and advances in cancer research and the scientific community's ability to translate these findings into clinical application. If the pace of discovery can be likened to speeding down a superhighway, our current ability to apply these findings still progresses at the slower pace of a country road. Where the two intersect, a bottleneck prevents a tremendous number of good ideas from moving forward. Our challenge is to continue to expand and smooth the country road, hastening discoveries to their application in interventions across the continuum of cancer care - from prevention and early detection to diagnosis, treatment, life after cancer, and the end of life.

To respond to this challenge, we identified six key areas for investment in our 2001 and 2002 proposals and will continue addressing these in 2003. Beginning with our 2002 proposal, we added new priority areas to address two persistent barriers to meeting our challenge: (1) inadequate quality of cancer care, and (2) disparities in access to information, patient care, and research opportunities and careers.

The plans proposed for these challenge areas describe new research awards or new and expanded programs and collaborations intended to help improve the prospects for patients and survivors of all types of cancers.

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