2024 KCRP Vignette

High Risk, High Impact: Investing in New Approaches Video (Text Version)

Cheryl Walker, Ph.D.

One of the challenges for the Kidney Cancer Research Program is how do you build the community? So many folks come into cancer research and they think of the big cancers, the breast cancers, the prostate cancers, the lung cancers and kidney isn't always at their top of the mind. And so what you really want is you want to get these amazing people who are brilliant thinkers or have talent to bear to come and look at kidney cancer. And so growing the field has been one of the challenges where the KCRP has been particularly successful, bringing in not just young investigators who we can grow up, but attracting people from outside the kidney cancer research area and saying, hey, you are doing something really exciting over here, why don't you think about trying to apply your talents in kidney cancer? And we actually have some mechanisms where we're encouraging folks to do that.

We have, for example, the Academy for Kidney Cancer researchers. This is a great program where institutions across the country have mentors that will help bring the young folks up and not only teach them about the science, about the treatment, how to do research, how to write grants, but also they can be partnered with young investigators who are not in some of the big institutions that do a lot of kidney cancer research. And so in that way, you're able to broaden the field, bring young folks up, and some of our grants, we actually say in the announcement, we are interested in you, even if you do not have a track record in kidney cancer, come talk to us. Tell us your ideas and we'd love to hear about it.

One of the exciting things about the kidney Cancer research program right now is the opportunity to help set the vision for the program. Where can we engage the community and make a real difference. Well, there's a couple of great areas. One is in the area of clinical trials. We would love to be able to see more exciting, impactful clinical trials, and we have mechanisms to do that. We also have a translational research partnership, and this is an amazing mechanism where we ask for a basic researcher and a clinician to pair up together. And as you can imagine, that could be some of the most exciting research coming in where you have both of those perspectives coming together to propose some new directions.

One of the advantages of being on a programmatic panel like this is you get to see the science from the reviewers perspective. And this is an amazing transformation in your life where you go from only thinking about your science as you're presenting it, to the science, as the reviewers are going to see it. And it's absolutely amazing. So, so at the end of the day, where is this science going to get you? if you're going to invest not just the kidney cancer research programs, dollars, but it's the time and energy even of the applicant that they're going to be doing this science. You want to know at the end they're going to make a difference. Is this only going to be an incremental advance? Is this going to get us a baby step more forward? Or if it is real, will this get us a huge leap forward in either understanding something about the disease we didn't know about, pushing a new therapy out there, and those are what you really want. Now, sometimes when we fund research, we're looking for exactly that; high risk, but high impact.