Developmental Funds

ABSTRACT: DEVELOPMENTAL FUNDS 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 and to launch innovative ideas through pilot project funding. Through these expenditures, the LCCC bolstered interdisciplinary and translational research efforts. By objective criteria such as extramural grants funded and junior faculty garnering national awards, LCCC recruitment efforts have been a stunning success. The competition for pilot project awards occurs twice yearly both with a general call for innovative ideas and specific RFAs devised by the Senior and Program Leaders to stimulate ideas arising from the LCCC planning processes. The awards have initiated new research across the clinical, population, translational, and basic spectrums, again yielding success in seeding extramural grant funding, broad collaborations, and cancer related publications. As has been the case over the last decade, Developmental Funds have been a key to growth, innovation, and the Center’s scientific and clinical impact. The Center distributed over $14.0M over the 5 year period and received a return on investment of $77M. LCCC requests $650,000 in this category, per year, in this renewal application, justified by past success and needs for a growing Center.