The goal of the Pilot Projects Program is to provide seed funding for highly innovative projects addressing the needs of the local communities. The greatest hurdle in meeting this goal is the physical distance between our institutions, which minimizes the necessary familiarity of interests, skills, and goals critical for successful collaborations to proceed. Our institutions must also overcome cultural barriers that have resulted in historically limited insight into the research being conducted at other regional institutions. We will address this deficiency through an innovative online expertise and interest matching program to formalize interactions between our institutions and investigators. We will assemble teams of clinician and non-clinician investigators to promote the critical working relationship needed for a successful collaboration. Moreover, we propose three unique types of pilot grants stemming from the matching database. The first will be an innovative ?ready-to-go? pilot award for more mature clinician/non-clinician teams. The second will be pilot awards to clinicians/non-clinicians in response to specific solicitations generated through community input gathered by our Community Engagement and Outreach Core. The third pilot program is a feasibility award directed towards those clinician/non-clinician teams requiring additional input from the Pilot Projects Program and Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design Core to formalize research design, statistical plans, and methodological needs in preparation for a larger pilot award. Using multiple funding mechanisms, we will foster collaborative translational research on topics ranging from molecules (genes/proteins) to populations and catalyze the translation of discoveries to treatments. Most importantly, all pilot awards will be derived from yearly participation in the interest/expertise matching software to improve the probability of success and provide a searchable database for tracking accomplishments and changes within our regional research effort.
DACCOTA-Pilot Projects Program Narrative: As part of the Dakota Cancer Collaborative on Translational Activity (DACCOTA), the Pilot Projects Program will stimulate growth of expertise and engagement in clinical and translational research (CTR) in the Upper Midwest region encompassed by the states of North and South Dakota. In addition, the program will provide a mechanism for clinicians to develop promising new translational ideas or products related to the broad area of cancer research, as this disease disproportionately affects the population of the Dakotas. Each pilot project should result in sufficient preliminary findings to support an extramural, collaborative grant application as a primary endpoint. Despite strong preclinical expertise in our region, we have a remaining need to promote translational output from our academic and private institutions. Therefore, the mission of this core is to provide seed funding for highly innovative CTR that addresses the translational research needs of the region.
