Chapter 17: The Multi-disciplinary Research Program

Chapter 17: The Multi-disciplinary Research Program

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Description

In this chapter, Dr. Bast sketches the history, aims and successes of the Multi-disciplinary Research Program. He explains the origins of the program ten years ago and its importance as funding from other sources has diminished. He explains that MD Anderson has invested $8.7 million via the Program and seen $136 million in grant money awarded. He explains how the Office of Translational Research identifies promising research and also provides coaching services and templates that investigators can use to create successful grant applications. He comments on the idea that grantors are more conservative today and explains that what is needed now are grants specifically targeted toward discovery projects. He notes that the Office of Translational Research is contributing to a strategic plan to address this issue at the institution.

Identifier

BastRC_03_20141218_C17

Publication Date

12-18-2014

Publisher

The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

City

Houston, Texas

Topics Covered

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - Building the Institution; Building/Transforming the Institution; Multi-disciplinary Approaches; Understanding Cancer, the History of Science, Cancer Research; The Institution and Finances; Research, Care, and Education

Transcript

Robert Bast, MD:

Sounds good.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

All right.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

All right, so I’ve pushed record. And the counter is moving. And today is December 18th, 2014. The time is 2:27. And I’m Tacey Ann Rosolowski. And today I’m on the eighth floor of Pickens Tower in the Office of Translational Research, interviewing Robert C. Bast, who’s the vice president of that office. And this is our third session together. So, thanks again for making time for this interview.

Robert Bast, MD:

Tacey, it’s a pleasure.

Robert Bast, MD:

We—I think you had mentioned a few minutes ago the MRP [Multi-disciplinary Research Programs].

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Yes.

Robert Bast, MD:

We developed the Multi-disciplinary Research Programs project some ten years ago, to support investigators at MD Anderson who wanted to come together to prepare a successful application for a multi-investigator award, either at the National Cancer Institute [NCI], or more recently at CPRIT [Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas]. The NCI multi-investigator awards include the Specialized Programs of Research Excellence (SPOREs) and the Program Project grants (P01s); and the CPRIT awards a Multi-Investigator Research Award (MIRA). In each of these awards, there are three or more projects that are much like individual investigator R01 grants, but they fit together, and there’s synergy between investigators working together on a similar project with a single theme. In addition, there are often Cores for administration, pathology, or statistics. These tend to be good sized grants in the range of $10M over 5 years, although they’ve been capped in recent years, and even reduced with some of the cutbacks in Washington. Given the size of our faculty and the fact that we’re deep and broad in a number of areas, we’ve competed particularly well for multi-investigator grants. The Multi-disciplinary Research Project program was developed to provide $250,000 to groups of investigators who wanted to come together over a two-and-one-half-year timeframe, to develop the preliminary data, establish firm collaborations, and publish joint papers that would support a successful application. Overall, we’ve invested about $8.7 million in MRPs to investigators at MD Anderson and we’ve received about $136 million in awards. So that’s about a sixteen-to-one return on investment. In recent years, the pay lines have decreased, particularly from NCI awards. Since 2007, it’s still been a ten-to-one return on investment. With MRP support, we’ve competed successfully for five SPOREs and nine P01s, and then a number of individual investigator grants that have been funded as spinoffs from those. So I think it’s been a successful project, and it’s really been a tribute to our investigators. If you give them a chance to develop new ideas and to—then to work together, they’re very good at it.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

So what kind of support does the program offer to make these groups of investigators so successful at winning this—these awards?

Robert Bast, MD:

Simply offering the opportunity to have in-house funding for these grants brings people together. We’ve developed a Mulitdisciplinary Research Awards Committee (MRAC) which includes faculty from a variety of different disciplines and with diverse interests that provides peer review for these awards. The idea is to try to identify a group of investigators and a group of projects with ideas that are sufficiently promising, that they stand a high chance of receiving federal or state peer-reviewed funding at the end of two and a half years or less. Our office has also has helped investigators develop Specialized Programs of Research Excellence, or SPORE awards. We provide common boilerplate about institutional facilities and instrumentation and the rest. We also proactively coach faculty and staff on how to submit these, and how to package them, and provide them with previous grants that investigators have submitted from here, so they’ve got a model to work from. Al [Wai-Kwan Alfred] Yung and more recently, Jeff [Jeffrey N.] Myers have been the co-chairs of the MRAC committee, which judges the MRPs. We generally meet with people who are thinking of applying for MRPs. I’ve served on many if not all of the SPORE internal advisory boards and a lot of the internal P01 advisory boards, as well. There are usually are both internal advisor and external advisors who meet with each SPORE or P01 each year.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Have you felt that what the funding groups are looking for has changed substantially in, say, the last seven to ten years? And so, investigators are kind of having to regroup a bit?

Robert Bast, MD:

In terms of these multi-investigator awards, not so much. Although I think the SPOREs have become more insistent on being able to take a project from the laboratory to the clinic within a five-year timeframe, or from the clinic and back in a five-year timeframe. That’s always been a stipulation for the awards, but I think it’s been taken much more seriously in recent years. With the pay lines as low as they are, less than ten percent of these multi-investigator awards are being funded and the number of SPOREs has actually been reduced from about sixty or sixty-five to fifty-five, the competition has become much more intense. As these are judged by study sections of mortals, sometimes the judgments are much more idiosyncratic, not just for the multi-investigator awards but for individual investigator awards. Our peer-review system has generally worked best when there were twenty-to-thirty percent of the grants funded. At that point, the individual opinions and tastes don’t weigh quite so heavily. But to get one of these grants funded, you’d have to have two or three peer-reviewed reviewers, or peer reviewers, who would agree that this is something that ought to be funded. And getting that kind of agreement across the scientific community is sometimes difficult.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Mm-hmm. Now I’ve spoken with some individuals in the course of the interviews who’ve reflected on the fact that funding is not only less available, but the funding that is available has become more conservative.

Robert Bast, MD:

Mm-hmm.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Would you agree with that?

Robert Bast, MD:

Yes, certainly as a gross generalization I think that that is true. Having all the preliminary data in place and doing incremental rather than really truly innovative high-risk approaches has been rewarded. Although, I guess in fairness to point out CPRIT has high-risk, high-reward grants, where they have been willing to fund some projects that are not incremental. And I think that’s very positive. There are also the R21 grants at NCI which are intended to be more innovative. And I think, to some extent, they are.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Mm-hmm. Now what is this office’s philosophy or approach to the range of investigations that might be available. That—you know, as they span conservative to more innovative, more risky, do you have a stance on that?

Robert Bast, MD:

Not really. We provide advice when asked to about all kinds of projects. At least in terms of our internal peer review for seed funding I don’t think that they have really discouraged innovation, quite the opposite. When you’re talking about a pilot project, you’ve got two and a half years to find out whether this is going to work out or not. So the time frame has been really helpful. One of the funding mechanisms that’s needed across the institution is to have grants specifically designed for discovery. We have IRG [Institutional Research Grant] grants for individual investigators—$50,000 to get an individual investigator—toward an individual investigator application. But we don’t have any funding source that would encourage people to look for synthetic lethality between genes. To some extent, some of the SPOREs and some of the Moon Shot programs have provided funding for that. But in terms of just competitive, pre-peer-review grants, that’s one of the gaps that could well be filled.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Mm-hmm. Is that something that this office has been working on, or thinking about to address?

Robert Bast, MD:

This is certainly something that we’ve been mentioning at (laughs)—to the people who make decisions about where our money should be invested. One of the things we’re currently working on is this strategic plan, as you know, across the institution. And there’s a—one niche of that is translational research. And one of the things we’re certainly discussing in that context is how we can encourage true innovation and discovery, and what the mechanisms could be that would be most effective to support that among our faculty.

Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Thank you.

Robert Bast, MD:

Yeah.

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Open

Chapter 17: The Multi-disciplinary Research Program

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