Unconventional Innovations Program (UIP)

Established: 1999

To spur development of daring technologic improvements in cancer treatment and detection in the 21st century, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) created the Unconventional Innovations Program (UIP). This program aimed to stimulate development of radically new technologies in cancer care that can transform what was impossible into the realm of the possible for detecting, diagnosing, and intervening in cancer at its earliest stages of development. The program was expected to invest $50 million over a ten-year period.

UIP took a new management approach to the development of technologies that target quantum improvements in existing technologies or entirely new approaches, rather than incremental improvements to the state of the art. UIP management actively recruited the interest and involvement of investigators from disciplines that have not traditionally received support from NCI in taking on the defined technology challenge.