OHIO STATE TO LEAD NATIONAL CONSORTIUM COORDINATING CENTER TO BOOST JUNIOR FACULTY CANCER RESEARCH CAREERS

Verschraegen

Jackson

OSUCCC – James scientists Claire Verschraegen, MD, and Rebecca Jackson, MD, will play a lead role in the establishment and coordination of a federally funded national consortium that will help junior faculty grant awardees maintain independent academic cancer research careers.

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has awarded a three-year grant of more than $1.63 million to support a new NCI Awardee Skills Development Consortium (NASDC) in a project titled “Enhancing Cancer-Focused Education for Tomorrow’s Workforce – Coordinating Center.” The NASDC coordinating center, to be located at Ohio State and overseen by Verschraegen and Jackson, will provide infrastructure enabling four other consortium institutions to offer courses designed to mentor junior faculty who have received NCI R-series (research) and K-series (career development) grants.

The four consortium institutions that will offer skills-development courses for NCI grant-funded junior faculty are:

• University of Pennsylvania, “The Cell and Gene Therapy Toolkit for Junior Faculty”

• Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute of Cancer Research, “MSK Immuno-Oncology for the Translational Researcher Short Course”

• University of Utah, “Utah Advanced Course on Mentoring and Leadership on Cancer-Related Health Disparities”

• Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, “Academic Career Skills for Junior Faculty Researchers”

Each course will be facilitated by a team of principal investigators (PIs) at the respective institutions. At Ohio State, Verschraegen and Jackson—senior scientists with years of experience in managing network awards—are PIs for the coordinating center (CC), with Verschraegen serving as contact PI.
Verschraegen also is a professor and director of the Division of Medical Oncology at Ohio State; at the OSUCCC James she is associate director for translational research and a member of the Translational Therapeutics Program. Jackson is a professor and director of Ohio State’s Center for Clinical and Translational Science (CCTS), and a member of the Cancer Control Program at the OSUCCC – James.

The NASDC CC has three aims: to centralize and support course administration, including trainee recruitment, engagement and implementation of courses; to create and coordinate network activities of a NASDC steering committee that will run the consortium; and to create and implement a system for evaluating the courses and the entire NASDC program short- and long-term. The NASDC CC will communicate all information within the consortium.

In addition, an operation manager will be hired to administer four NASDC implementation cores, including: a Leadership Core to oversee and administer all NASDC CC activities; a Marketing Core to advertise the NASDC courses and help select participants through a peer-review mechanism focused on diversity enhancement (plans call for reaching some 1,500 junior NCI awardees); an Operation Management Core to support courses, including venues, travels, contracts, data collection, etc.; and an Evaluation and Data Analysis Core to develop assessments for the NASDC program.

The NASDC mission of helping junior faculty establish and maintain their cancer research careers is in compliance with the 21st Century Cures Act, which was signed into law in December 2016 and, among other things, calls for the creation of inter-center institutes to help coordinate activities in major disease areas such as cancer.

“This is a very exciting mentorship consortium that will help train the junior workforce to become independent investigators,” Verschraegen says, adding that these researchers “will take the lead in innovative cancer care for the future.”