After 10 days of work-related travel connected to a bit of free time to visit family in California and Philadelphia, I returned to an exceptionally busy week of work. However, there was a clear highlight for me. On Monday and Tuesday the Executive Committee of the cancer center convened at 2115 Wisconsin Avenue with additional Lombardi members to build a foundation for our next five years.
We reviewed the CCSG Summary Statement, incorporated its comments and suggested action items into our existing 2021-2026 Strategic Plan, and then focused on what I proposed were the four major action items we must address to support our future success as an NCI-designated comprehensive cancer center:
- Obtain three or more multi-project, multi-PI grants, such as P01, U54 or SPORE grants, that span the Georgetown Lombardi Consortium. To achieve our goals of three such grants, we recognized that we will need to advance about 15 multi-PI projects to be able to get three or more of them funded within five years. Of course, even more than three such projects would be great, and they would increase our impact and funding base.
- Increase transdisciplinary collaboration and coordination (multiple clinical disciplines/departments across the consortium, evidenced by joint publications and grants).
- Increase the accrual of patients to high-impact clinical trials linked to Georgetown Lombardi science. We have made significant progress and can support 600+ therapeutic accruals annually across the consortium, and aim for 800+ accruals within five years. I am confident we can achieve these goals. Linking accruals with Georgetown Lombardi science will be critically important, but that is the fun part!
- Continue recruitments in accord with the CCSG Strategic Plan to increase our research depth (currently about $22M annual direct costs of cancer-focused research funding, up from about $13M in 2018). We aim to approach the median cancer-focused funding of NCI-designated comprehensive cancer centers; while it will take time, maintaining our upward trajectory is an urgent priority for continued future NCI designations. We are moving forward with recruitment plans over the next few months.
Buoyed by significant investments by Georgetown University, Hackensack Meridian Health and MedStar Health, we have the bandwidth to execute these priorities. We were excited to consider strategies for new developmental projects and settled on a strategy to iteratively identify project teams who will receive Georgetown Lombardi support to work towards multi-PI projects. We aim to do this yearly, with options for one-year renewals of support (based on progress reports). We anticipate that the selected teams will address important problems, and that teams will be composed of members whose funding profiles and histories increase the likelihood of success.
Our first three priorities are a developing a U54 focused on Minority Health and Health Disparities, led by Lucile Adams Campbell; a team focused on colon cancer biology and therapy, led by David Robbins and Binfeng Lu; and a team addressing the epigenetics of tumors and the host immune response, to be led by Yi Zhang and Nagi Ayad, along with Chunling Yi. Each of these teams has been charged with creating a brief proposal that will be reviewed over the next month or so, with funding to commence by May. The next group of project teams will be solicited after July 1.
We are really excited about this initiative and expect that these efforts will help us achieve our key goals and spin off additional activities that engage all of us in this progress.
Stay safe and be well.
Lou
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