Introduction
What is an "Extraordinary Opportunity"?
How are Extraordinary Opportunities chosen?
What is the purpose of the Extraordinary Opportunities?
Proposed funding increase for Fiscal Year 2003
NCI's "extraordinary opportunities for investment" are broad-based, overarching areas of scientific pursuit that hold tremendous promise for significantly expanding our understanding of cancer. With focused efforts and increased resources in these areas, we can build on past successes and technological breakthroughs to stimulate dramatic progress in addressing some of our most difficult questions.
Although the needed resources are not trivial, our failure to respond quickly with investment in all of these areas will slow the pace of cancer research at all levels and impair our ability to find better ways to care for those whose lives are touched by cancer.
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NCI seeks formal input from cancer experts representing a broad spectrum of perspectives to help identify these areas of exceptional promise. Every three years, we ask members of the research community, advisory groups, and advocacy organizations to revisit the "extraordinary opportunities" and recommend important areas of research into which additional resources should be infused over the next three-year cycle.
We thoroughly assess these responses, blend related ideas, and, with our advisors, select new investment areas. The current six extraordinary opportunities were first outlined in NCI's Fiscal Year 2001 budget proposal and are continued in this proposal for Fiscal Year 2003.
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The purpose of the extraordinary opportunities is to identify areas of discovery that build upon important recent developments in knowledge and technology and that hold promise for making significant progress against all cancers. Extraordinary opportunities must:
- Involve approaches to cancer research beyond the size, scope, and funding of our current research activities.
- Be implementable with specific defined investments.
- Be described in terms of achievable milestones.
The plans proposed for these extraordinary opportunity areas describe new research awards and new or expanded programs and collaborations intended to help improve the prospects for patients and survivors of all types of cancers.
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| Extraordinary Opportunities |
2003 Budget Increase Request
(dollars in thousands) |
 | Amount |
| Genes and the Environment | $55,500 |
| Cancer Imaging | 69,800 |
| Defining the Signatures of Cancer Cells | 75,000 |
| Molecular Targets of Prevention and Treatment | 42,500 |
| Research on Tobacco and Tobacco-Related Cancers | 67,000 |
| Cancer Communications | 19,050 |
| Total | $328,850 |
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