2023 KCRP Vignette

Advancing Therapeutics, Diagnostics, and Biomarker Discovery Video (Text Version)

Donald Bottaro, Ph.D., Programmatic Panel Chair, Emeritus; National Cancer Institute

I was asked in 2016 to become part of the Programmatic Panel for the KCRP, the Kidney Cancer Research Program, and so I joined and, and I've been on it since.

Our mission statement and our goals are actually on the website. But to put it in simple terms, we want to advance therapeutics and diagnostics and biomarkers and, in the clinical realm, we want to see if agents being developed for other cancers are appropriate for renal cancer. But we also want to identify new targets.

Kidney cancer was only broken down at a molecular level more recently than more prevalent cancers like lung cancer, skin cancer, breast cancer. As a result, the development of drug targets and an understanding of cancer pathogenesis in kidney cancer was just at an earlier stage of development. And so that meant that our goals would be different from programs with more development in the molecular area. We wanted to start a clinical arm of the KCRP right away because that takes time to develop. But at the same time, we wanted to get more applications in from two groups: (1) young investigators, because you always want to bring new investigators into a research area in order to have it grow and (2) other investigators who are involved in molecular studies but weren't necessarily doing kidney cancer and the investigators who were involved mostly in other fields, but would bring expertise that hadn't yet been shared in the kidney cancer community and the research community.

So those were important goals. They took the form of mechanisms like translational research partnerships because, that way, you often bring in scientists who are experts in a certain technology or methods of development of drugs or assays and partner them with a clinician who is committed to, say, kidney cancer and has access to kidney cancer patients and kidney cancer tissue. And so those were important to get started.

We want to develop opportunities for people who participate in kidney cancer research but are not always funded through other mechanisms that are offered by other large institutions. So, for instance, we're trying to attract nurses who do research to apply for funds that we offer that will help them advance research nursing in their area and help them even do research projects that are associated with clinical trials of which they are a part. This, I think, is somewhere the DOD's funding could really make a difference.

Of course, one of the original goals of the KCRP and a consistent goal throughout the program has been to avoid duplicating what other programs do. Our goal is to complement those programs, to build research in areas that they don't consider their main focus. So some of the areas of the KCRP’s focus are not along the mainstream goals of other large institutions. So, in addition to distinguishing ourselves by the goal to serve Service Members and Veterans, there's the goal to serve the community in ways that we see aren't well covered by those larger organizations. Obviously, any aspect of the disease that we see that's commonly seen in VA’s hospitals or, so among Veterans, will be a priority in the program.