Break Through Cancer Launches with $250M

Five major cancer centers have formed a foundation aimed at accelerating progress against some of the most hard-to-treat cancers. Break Through Cancer, launched recently with an initial pledge of $250 million from philanthropists Alice T. and William H. Goodwin Jr., is expected to begin awarding grants to research teams within the next few months (see http://breakthroughcancer.org).

“We've created Break Through Cancer to take the concept of collaboration significantly further than ever before,” said the foundation's president, Tyler Jacks, PhD, at a news conference. “We hope to develop proof of concept for new ways to rapidly integrate the best of science and the most powerful technologies into clinical research and cancer treatments, resulting in dramatic improvements for patients.”

The five founding institutions have long-standing philanthropic ties to the Goodwins, whose son, Hunter Goodwin III, died from cancer last year at age 51. Participants include: Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, MA, The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, MD, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, NY, the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT in Cambridge, MA, and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

Grants of up to several million dollars each will support multidisciplinary teams of researchers from across the five centers, and possibly scientists at other institutions in the future, said Jacks, who is also the founding director of the Koch Institute and a former president of the American Association for Cancer Research. The foundation—which aims to raise $500 million over the next 10 years—will initially fund translational projects that focus on four difficult-to-treat malignancies: pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer, glioblastoma, and acute myelogenous leukemia.

Break Through Cancer's chief science officer, Jesse Boehm, PhD, formerly of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, and its scientific advisory board—comprised of experts from nonparticipating institutions—will take a much more active role in planning and executing projects than has traditionally occurred in cancer research, Jacks noted.

“Our leaders and board members will work closely with institutions from the outset to form innovative teams and shape bold, potentially transformative research plans,” he said. “They will monitor progress of these teams closely, help them clear hurdles, pivot if research warrants, and drive faster, smarter, and ideally more successful clinical studies.”

According to Boehm, leaders also plan to tackle challenges around sharing clinical, genomic, and laboratory data across institutions without compromising patient privacy. “Often, there are funding barriers to creating and maintaining high-quality software tools that actually make sharing data easy and useful,” he said. “We will explore this in detail, as we suspect that adequately incentivizing and resourcing data sharing will go a long way toward making collaborations work.”

The group will work closely with the NCI and other major funders, as well as biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. “Our goal is to get new medications out there as fast as possible,” said board member Laurie Gilmcher, MD, of Dana-Farber. “Our industry partners can facilitate a path from discovery to treatment.”

The foundation's commitment to collaboration is inspired in part by the scientific community's robust response to COVID-19, Jacks said. During the COVID-19 pandemic, “there's been a sense that progress—as opposed to individual accomplishment—is the most important thing,” he said. “We want to bring that same sense of urgency to the problems that we face in cancer.” –Janet Colwell

For more news on cancer research, visit Cancer Discovery online at http://cancerdiscovery.aacrjournals.org/CDNews.