1. Global assessment of funding trends across a diverse spectrum of issues in breast cancer research
Kari Wojtanik, Ph.D.
Susan G. Komen
Samantha Finstad, Ph.D.
National Cancer Institute
Lynne Davies, Ph.D.
Cancer Research UK
International Cancer Research Partnership
Senaida Poole, Ph.D.
California Breast Cancer Research

2. Metastatic breast cancer (1)
Background
Joint project with Metastatic Breast Cancer Alliance Vision: Transform and improve the lives of women and men living with metastatic breast cancer
ICRP assisting with the specific mission of “strategic coordination of research funding specifically focused on metastasis that has the potential to extend life, enhance quality of life and ultimately to cure”
Challenge
Identify research in the portfolio that is relevant specifically to metastatic breast cancer
Condense that information for strategic analysis
Mission

3. Metastatic breast cancer (2)
Evaluation approach
Identify and analyze grants from ICRP and Health Research Alliance databases
Pilot dataset: Keyword, CSO and cancer site (50% BC) analysis – manual review of subset
Full dataset: refine and semi-automate the approach
Examples of keywords:
metasta*
Invasive*
Invasion*
angiogene*

4. Metastatic breast cancer (3)
Challenge
Identify molecular targets being researched and link to metastatic pathways
Are resources focussed on a narrow range of targets?
Are targets reaching the clinic?
Gaps and opportunities for co-ordinated funding approaches?

5. Metastatic breast cancer (4)
Classification schema for research grants
Challenge
Identifying molecular targets is a challenge in non-structured text (e.g., multiple variants of gene/protein names – Bcl2, Bcl 2, bcl-2 etc.)
Approach
Manual coders to identify as many gene/protein names as possible
Combine pilot data with excel auto-lookups to find similar text strings in the wider dataset
Mission

6. Metastatic breast cancer (5)
Outputs
Dataset of awards tagged with rich meta-data for further analysis
Profile of current state of play in MBC
Project highlighted need for more automated systems to link abstracts to existing gene/protein databases Qu: what research areas are progressing ? Joint project initiated with Sagebase.org to address this.
Mission

7. Conclusion Evaluation approaches
Valuable resource of data with abstracts in ICRP db
In-built CSO and cancer classifications allow large datasets to be filtered down to manageable # awards for further analysis
Semi-automated boolean searches for keywords are helpful for refining and enriching data
Better methods needed for interrogating large datasets with specific keywords (e.g., gene / protein names) and updating these keywords
Linking to publication outputs is important
Which grants are producing outputs?
Are there druggable targets that are not being pursued?
How can funding organizations help remove barriers?