The University of the District of Columbia (UDC) and the Lombardi Cancer Center (LCC) are proposing to establish a planning U56 funded Partnership that will build upon their successes in a currently funded P20 Partnership. The U56-funded Partnership will focus exclusively on Cancer Prevention and Control. This is a highly relevant focus for the District of Columbia (DC), which has among the higher cancer death rates in the nation.
The specific aims are: (1) to establish a Planning and Evaluation Core that will identify priorities, evaluate progress and determine success; (2) to establish a Developmental Core that will begin with 4 pilot projects and new faculty recruits and; (3) to establish a LCC and UDC jointly taught UDC masters program in Cancer Biology, Prevention and Control. The goal of this partnership is to allow the investigators to develop mutually beneficial collaborations worthy of new peer-reviewed funding. Thus, this U56 mechanism is focused on obtaining pilot data that will allow us to test future hypotheses, rather than answer current research questions that would lead to publications. In the first two years, the pilot projects are focused on the structure of data needed to obtain grants such as R01's, while it is anticipated that in the later years we will focus on data to obtain a U54 Partnership grant. The four pilot projects span the range of cancer control. These include: 1) a nutrition project involving low-income pregnant women; 2) use of counter-marketing techniques for prevention of cigarette smoking by packaging data from tobacco industry documents targeting African Americans; 3) enhancing enrollment for minorities in clinical trials, and; 4) identifying methods to integrate palliative care for minorities in medical school curricula. We also will establish a jointly conducted masters program in Cancer Biology, Prevention and Control, emphasizing the need for basis sciences and cancer control for more effective cancer control research, and stimulating minority students to pursue research careers. This U56 Partnership is feasible and the outcomes are achievable because with the P20 funding we have found that our faculty can work together on both research and teaching projects. We have identified that the strengths and limitations of each institution are most complementary in the area of cancer prevention and control. Each institution has expressed in writing a commitment to insure the success of the Partnership.
