PCR Funding Report 2020

Page 7

A review of the funding and knowledge gaps in prostate cancer research across the UK: 2020 05

INNOVATION MEANS TAKING RISKS Scientists at all levels of their careers find it difficult to get funding for innovative ideas.

What we are doing Last year, we designed our pilot grants, where we funded high-risk proposals for a year to 18 months, with the understanding that when the pilot project was 75% complete, we would assess it again and give a quick turnaround decision on whether to extend the funding for up to another 4 years. We are now prepared to support more ambitious ideas in the hope of bigger breakthroughs, accepting that may mean more failures along the way.

Our plan Fostering innovation and high-risk, high-reward research is possibly our greatest challenge in an established sector which can be risk-averse. We will commit to continually assessing our grant calls to ensure they are compatible with high-risk, high-reward proposals. There is a clear need for greater clarity on the level of evidence required for grant applications. We will continue to discuss this with our Scientific Advisory Committee, and we recommend that the sector as a whole engages in discussion around this issue.

… there are researchers with bright ideas willing to tackle these knowledge gaps, if funding is made available for them to do it.

FILLING THE GAPS A number of knowledge gaps are resulting in significant patient needs not being met. Some of these, such as spread of cancer to bone, are unmet needs across several cancer types, whereas others, such as the role of Androgen Receptor Variants (ARV), are specific to prostate cancer.

What we are doing We were already funding work into disease classification, bone metastasis, and ARVs. We highlighted the knowledge gaps identified by this analysis as particular areas of interest in our 2020 grant call. Almost 40% of applications pertained to one or more of these areas, demonstrating that there are researchers with bright ideas willing to tackle these knowledge gaps, if funding is made available for them to do it.

Our plan We will continue to monitor knowledge gaps, in a number of different ways. For example, our analysis of the literature revealed that predicting a prostate tumour’s likely aggressiveness and therapy response was an unmet need. Better diagnostics and better classification represent approaches to solve this. Subsequent analysis, after we had launched our 2020 grant call, revealed that classification is relatively unfunded. Our attempt to attract social science and quality of life proposals was less successful than we had hoped and we will re-examine whether our process was suitable for this cohort of researchers. Where prostate cancer shares a knowledge gap or unmet need with another disease, we will seek to develop a partnership to tackle it with other charities in that space. It is clear to us that charities could have much more impact if we worked together, and if we worked together with government.

BREAKING OUT OF THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE One of the most striking things to come out of this analysis was the extent to which both funding and clinical trials are concentrated within London, Oxford and Cambridge, and the difficulties scientists face attracting collaborations and recruiting when they are based outside of this region. With the exception of Manchester, which has a well-known very good infrastructure for research and development, the only universities to have more than three prostate cancer groups were located within this triangle.

What we are doing Our 2019 grant call awarded funding to the North-East, Scotland, and East Anglia. Over the past year, we have gained a much stronger understanding of the impact of location on research funding. We are also specifically developing plans for greater patient engagement in regions where patient empowerment has historically been low.

Our plan The findings of this report recommend that we look in detail at all of our options to make sure we are funding the best scientists and the best ideas, irrespective of where they are based. Grant making organisations such as ourselves should consider place-based funding, weighting funding and countering institution bias to try and ensure that there is equal opportunity for good scientists.


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