Leveraging talent
No one feels the effects of these economic realities more than the new researchers who come to Dana-Farber with little but the ideas in their heads, figuratively speaking. Although both clinical and basic scientists earn Institute paychecks, they are responsible for bringing in their own research funding. The catch-22: to qualify for NIH support, the researcher must convince grant-proposal reviewers that the project has promise.
"To apply for grants you need preliminary data, but you don't have any yet," says Sicinski, who received MD and PhD degrees in his native Poland and trained in England and Cambridge, Mass., before coming to Dana-Farber five years ago. "So you need support for two or three years."
Matthew Kulke, MD, devotes part of his time to seeing patients such as Anita O'Brien.
To ease this transition, DFCI provides new researchers with start-up funds to pay all or part of their salaries for a certain number of years and to establish laboratories. These seed funds may amount to several hundred thousand dollars per investigator.
With this aid, Sicinski purchased the expensive equipment he needs to study the development of animal embryos, including an embryo manipulation station and two high-end microscopes. He has a particular financial burden because of the many experimental mice he needs: It costs about $30,000 a year just to maintain 100 mouse cages.
Sicinski also benefited from the Institute's Claudia Adams Barr Program in Innovative Basic Cancer Research, intended to help tide over young researchers in their early years. The 15-year-old program is fueled by funds collected by runners in the annual Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge.
Kulke was in much the same situation when he joined the Institute in 1997 as a medical oncology fellow. His salary was supplied by Dana-Farber to compensate his time seeing patients with gastrointestinal cancers. But he would have to track down his own research money.
Again, a DFCI program came to the rescue when Kulke was named a Dunkin' Donuts Rising Star as part of another effort to fund junior investigators, this one by the Massachusetts-based restaurant chain. The program provided him with valuable support from 1999 to 2001.
At the same time, the young scientist got involved in clinical trials of Endostatin, which produced some positive results in patients who had neuroendocrine tumors — the type in which Kulke is interested. That led to his being chosen for additional clinical trials of other drugs for carcinoid tumors, a kind of neuroendocrine cancer found in the gastrointestinal tract. Kulke, who along with Robert Mayer wrote a New England Journal of Medicine review article on carcinoid tumors, subsequently came to the attention of the Verto Foundation in New York, which funds research on these tumors. Recently, he received a two-year, $500,000 grant from the foundation.
"This is huge," he says. "The hope is that once we've been able to get preliminary data from this research, we'll be in a position to write an NIH grant proposal and leverage this into a larger federally funded project."
