Today, we are excited to reveal the 12 shortlisted teams who are in with a chance of securing up to $25m in Cancer Grand Challenges funding to make radical progress against some of cancer’s toughest challenges.
In March 2023, we announced nine new, ambitious challenges to the global research community and invited research teams to apply to take them on. In response, we received applications from 176 world-class global teams who proposed bold ideas to tackle these cancer challenges.
The Cancer Grand Challenges Scientific Committee had the challenging task of narrowing the innovative ideas down to a shortlist of just 12 teams, who will now compete for funding.
"We had a fantastic response from the global research community who rose to the task and submitted bold and innovative ideas to take on our new challenges," says Dr David Scott, director of Cancer Grand Challenges. "We are pleased to have a shortlist of 12 teams whose proposed research approaches we believe hold the greatest potential to make the progress against these cancer challenges that we urgently need. I'm looking forward to seeing how the teams develop their approaches further in their full applications."
The 12 interdisciplinary, global teams span 84 institutions in 18 countries, uniting more than 130 investigators and world-class researchers across a broad range of disciplines including statistics, mathematics, population science and computational biology.
"We are already seeing how interdisciplinary and creative approaches can help solve some of the biggest challenges in cancer care," says Dinah S. Singer, PhD, deputy director for scientific strategy and development at the National Cancer Institute in the US. "We're excited to see how these innovative and enterprising researchers who have been shortlisted will move forward with their proposals, and we look forward to learning how they plan to tackle this latest round of challenges."
Each shortlisted team will now receive seed funding to develop its vision for tackling its chosen challenge into a full proposal. The shortlisted teams will be working closely with members of the Cancer Grand Challenges Advocacy Panel, helping to ensure that a meaningful advocacy plan is embedded within each team’s proposed approach.
The Scientific Committee will review the full proposals later this year.
The teams with proposals that hold the greatest promise to make progress will each receive up to $25m in funding, empowering them to come together, think differently and conduct transformative research with the ultimate aim of changing outcomes for people with cancer.
The winning teams will be announced in March 2024.