LUNGevity Announces Funding Opportunity for First-Ever Lung Cancer Early Detection and Interception Dream Team

[LaurenH]

LUNGevity Announces Funding Opportunity for First-Ever Lung Cancer Early Detection and Interception Dream Team

Call for ideas for SU2C-LUNGevity-American Lung Association collaboration

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media Contact: 

Linda Wenger
lwenger@lungevity.org
(973) 449-3214

WASHINGTON, DC (February 6, 2017) – Building on the Foundation’s more than seven years of strategic investment in early detection research, LUNGevity Foundation, in collaboration with Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C) and the American Lung Association (through its LUNG FORCE initiative), is pleased to announce that the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), SU2C’s scientific partner, has issued a Call for Ideas for research proposals that focus on lung cancer early detection and interception: catching precancerous cells and blocking them from turning into cancer cells. The interdisciplinary and multi-institutional SU2C-LUNGevity-American Lung Association Lung Cancer Interception Dream Team will be the first of its kind, with up to $7 million in funding support.

As Dr. Pierre Massion, Professor of Medicine and Cancer Biology at Vanderbilt University, points out, "We understand the pathogenesis of lung cancer a lot better now. People have come to recognize that detecting the disease early and preventing it will require efforts between multiple disciplines to get there. The Lung Cancer Interception Dream Team is a huge step toward this goal." Dr. Massion is a member of LUNGevity’s distinguished Scientific Advisory Board and co-chairs the SU2C-LUNGevity-American Lung Association Joint Scientific Advisory Committee (JSAC).

LUNGevity is the only lung cancer nonprofit with a programmatic focus on early detection, to find lung cancer when it is most treatable. Currently, only 15% of people with lung cancer are diagnosed in the earliest stages, resulting in a 5-year survival rate of only 17.7%.  This project expands on LUNGevity’s investment in early detection research with the goal of developing an effective, widely available, noninvasive way of finding lung cancer early in all populations.

Prioritized areas of interest for this project include research that accurately categorizes premalignant conditions according to risk of progression and that elucidates the underlying alterations that increase that risk; identification of new targets for developing therapeutic interventions of these early lesions; potential surrogate endpoints for clinical trials and regulatory approval; new tools for early detection and monitoring progression; the role of inflammation and immunosuppression in progression; or research targeted at generating sufficient knowledge to justify a clinical intervention to test novel hypotheses.

Applicants for the grants are expected to show how their proposed projects will have positive benefit for patients in the near future, achieved through investigation by a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional, synergistic Dream Team of expert investigators. Priority will be given to applications that are characterized by a diversity of team members, including those from fields outside the traditional realms of biomedical research (e.g., physics, mathematics, engineering, health policy, and communications). Specific aims of the project may include basic research, translational studies, and population studies, but the overall proposal must have a strong clinical research component.

Program details can be found at https://proposalcentral.altum.com. Letters of Intent are due by March 8, 2017.

Read the full press release on LUNGevity's website.