Diversifying Cancer Research with the Breast Cancer Research Foundation-AACR Career Development Award to Promote Diversity and Inclusion
Breast Cancer Awareness Month occurs every October as an international health campaign helping to promote awareness, screening, and prevention of breast cancer, the second most common cancer in women in the United States (1). Although the development of drugs to treat breast cancer has resulted in decreased mortality, age-adjusted breast cancer mortality in the United States remains around 40% higher for black women than non-Hispanic White women, despite a lower incidence among black women (2).
Promoting diversity within the cancer research and care workforce by investing in early-career researchers is essential to overcome cancer disparities. In partnership with the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, the AACR launched the Breast Cancer Research Foundation-AACR Career Development Award to Promote Diversity and Inclusion in 2021. Aiming to encourage and support investigators from diverse backgrounds, the grant offers $150,000 over two years to researchers who are racially or ethnically underrepresented in the cancer workforce, enabling them to perform research designed to accelerate the discovery, development, and application of new agents to treat breast cancer.
Kimberley Lee, MD, MHS, was a recipient of the inaugural Breast Cancer Research Foundation- AACR Career Development Award in 2021. Explaining her project, “The Role of Adjuvant Endocrine Therapy in Racial Disparities in Survival,” she said, “This project sought to understand the barriers that Black women with breast cancer face with regards to staying on a breast cancer medication for the prescribed length of time.” Adjuvant endocrine therapy, taken daily for 5-10 years, reduces the risk of recurrence and death from certain types of breast cancer. However non-adherence to the medication can make a patient’s outcomes worse. “Given the interplay between disparities in breast cancer outcomes and non-adherence to oral medication, it’s important to develop interventions to address these barriers,” she said.
Speaking to the importance of providing funding to support investigators from diverse backgrounds, she said, “Investigators from diverse and underrepresented backgrounds in cancer research often face numerous challenges to building a successful research career. However, the ideas these individuals have are usually rooted in the needs of our communities and therefore important to explore. Funding ameliorates some of the challenges by providing protected time, funds to do research, and often lends credibility to the researcher and the research idea.”
In 2022, Dennis Jones, PhD, was awarded a Breast Cancer Research Foundation-AACR Career Development Award. “Being awarded the Breast Cancer Research Foundation-AACR grant provided a level of validation, as it showed that other scientists found our research interesting and impactful. This recognition delivered a much-needed psychological boost and motivated me to keep pushing forward. Without this support, I might have pursued a different career path. However, the grant reaffirmed my confidence in the value of our work, both to the scientific community and in its potential to ultimately benefit breast cancer patients,” he said.
He went on to say, “Early-career investigators face numerous challenges which are often exacerbated for investigators from historically underrepresented backgrounds. Building a research team and securing funding, for me particularly, was challenging partly due to my relatively small professional network,” adding, “Beyond the financial support, this prestigious grant offered invaluable recognition as a promising cancer researcher and created virtual and in-person networking opportunities through the AACR and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, helping to expand my connections in the field.”
In his project, “Improving anti-breast cancer immunity by targeting solid stress,” Dr. Jones investigated whether the compression of blood vessels by physical forces from tumors, known as solid stress, could be reversed with existing drugs to increase the presence of T cells in breast tumors. “Importantly, this support helped us generate valuable preliminary data, which laid the groundwork for our successful R01 application. Now, we can significantly expand the scope of the project to include analyses of clinical data and samples to complement our preclinical studies,” he said.
Yehoda Martei, MD, MSCE, received a Breast Cancer Research Foundation-AACR Career Development Award in 2023. “The BCRF-AACR award comes at a pivotal time when there is a global awareness in the scientific community of the systematic under-representation of minority populations in cancer research,” she said. She noted, “I am deeply passionate about research using implementation science methodology to promote high quality cancer care globally and this funding allows me to extend my work with a focus on local disparities within the US.”
Explaining her funded project, “Effectiveness of community health workers (CHW) on access to breast cancer care,”Dr. Martei said, “In this project, we aim to evaluate the implementation outcomes of a CHW program by enrolling breast cancer patients who live in Philadelphia neighborhoods with 20% or higher poverty rates. The majority of these patients have an annual income of less than $15,000, a population we anticipate has high prevalence of barriers to cancer care. We also plan to analyze data of patients who were previously enrolled in a standardized CHW program and later developed cancer, to gain insight into how prior enrollment in a CHW program may have sustained effects in helping patients navigate a cancer diagnosis and access treatment.”
She went on to say, “The funding has allowed me to foster new collaborations and gain new skills in community-engaged research, and I learned how this can be efficiently leveraged using rigorous scientific methodology to empower and provide linkage to resources for patients who have been historically under-represented in clinical trials, in order to promote equitable access to standard of care cancer treatment. This award also signaled to me that this is a scientific focus that BCRF and AACR believe is equally important and fundable research. One of the rewarding experiences related to this award has been the opportunity to network, to learn from, and be inspired by other AACR grantees.”
Evanthia Roussos Torres, MD, PhD, also received the Breast Cancer Research Foundation-AACR Career Development Award in 2023, for her project, “Suppressing Suppression: myeloid centric approach to an anti-tumor response.” She said, “This grant allowed me and my team to investigate the changes in the tumor immune microenvironment within metastatic sites. Understanding how changes in immune suppression driven by epigenetic modulation change the exact environment that metastatic cancer is growing is imperative in understanding how to improve novel targeted therapy to combine with immune checkpoint inhibition to promote better response for our patients.”
Highlighting the importance of the program, she said, “This grant has served as a gateway into prestigious groups of scientists who are similarly supported by AACR and BCRF. Becoming a member of these groups has been invaluable in providing opportunities to disseminate my exciting findings by giving seminars and meetings at universities around the world, and to network at smaller grantee events to foster collaboration. Collaborations that have bloomed from these interactions have led to new avenues of related research topics and opportunities to share data in a way that promotes team science. These opportunities have enabled me to build a national, and someday international, presence in the field and work toward becoming one of the next leaders by mentorship and exposure to some of the best minds in our area.”
We invite early-career investigators from underrepresented groups and/or low-resource settings to submit a Letter of Intent for the 2025 Breast Cancer Research Foundation-AACR Career Development Awards to Promote Diversity and Inclusion by December 4, 2024.
References:
- National Cancer Institute Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program. Cancer Stat Facts: Female Breast Cancer. Accessed October 16, 2024. Available from: https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/breast.html
- Jatoi I, et al. The Emergence of the Racial Disparity in U.S. Breast-Cancer Mortality. N Engl J Med. 2022; 386(25):2349-2352.