Developmental Funds support the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center (LCCC) mission directly through the provision of resources and indirectly by leveraging institutional and philanthropic assets. Collectively, these resources expand and enhance cancer research across LCCC in the basic, clinical, population and translational sciences. During the last five years, these funds have been used to make key recruitments, to launch innovative ideas, and to make technical advances within our Shared Resources. Through these expenditures, the LCCC bolstered interdisciplinary and translational research efforts. By objective criteria, e.g. extramural grants funded, and junior faculty garnering national awards, our recruitment and retention efforts have been a stunning success. Our range of pilot project awards have initiated new research across the clinical, population, translational, and basic spectrum, again yielding success in seeding extramural grant funding, broad collaborations, and cancer related publications. The funds provided for Shared Resources have developed new techniques, particularly those translating fundamental discoveries into clinical applications. A decision by NCI three years into this cycle allowed expenditures of Developmental Funds for projects outside the borders of the United States. We were please to utilize this capability to fund pilot projects in our initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa that have led to significant NCI grant funding. While we retained the capability of using Developmental Funds for bridge funding, we did not utilize any Development Funds for this in the last cycle. As has been the case over the last decade, Developmental Funds have been key in the growth of the Center's scientific and clinical impact. LCCC requests $50,000 increase in this category, to $700,000 per year, in this renewal application, justified by past success and needs for a growing Center. We will continue to use these funds in recruitment, pilot projects, and Shared Resource development and retain the potential for interim (bridge) funding.
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