SPORE grants seed new discoveries
By Robert Levy
Thomas Kupper, MD, leads the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center's newest SPORE, which focuses on melanoma skin cancer and a form of lymphoma.
Do cells in the milk ducts of the breast contain subtle giveaways of their likelihood of becoming cancerous? Which proteins propel breast cells to form tumors? Do women with an almost-always curable form of breast cancer experience the same anxieties as those whose disease is less easily treated?
The answers to these questions are being sought in a series of studies now under way at Dana-Farber and its affiliated schools and hospitals. What the projects have in common — aside from their obvious focus on breast cancer — is that they and five other breast cancer-related studies are being funded by a single five-year grant, as part of the Specialized Program of Research Excellence, or SPORE, from the National Cancer Institute.
SPORE grants were established in 1992 to support "translational" research — studies that apply the lessons of the laboratory to actual human cancers and, conversely, use what's learned from patients as a springboard for studying the basic biology of disease. The program, which began with a budget of $20 million a decade ago, now distributes more than $200 million to SPORE programs across the country. The Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center (DF/HCC) is currently the recipient of two such grants: one in breast cancer, awarded in 2000, and one for skin cancer, awarded last year.
"The aim of a SPORE is to build a collaborative community around specific types of cancer. I brought people together whose research I thought would reinforce and extend one another."
— Thomas Kupper, MD
What makes SPORE grants unique — and makes them a "natural" for collaborative programs such as the DF/HCC — is that they shape the kind of research that investigators perform by expanding their sense of the sort of projects that are possible.
"SPORE grants change the way you think about your work," says J. Dirk Iglehart, MD, director of the Women's Cancers Program at Dana-Farber and principal investigator of the DF/HCC SPORE in breast cancer. "If you're a basic scientist, knowing that the SPORE program exists gets you to think about the practical uses of your research. If you're a clinician, it encourages you to think about how insights into the basic mechanisms of cancer can ultimately help patients."
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