Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge
The Claudia Adams Barr Program in Innovative Cancer Research
Leverage
Barr Program support has provided a platform from which investigators can obtain much larger levels of financial support for their projects. Examples of leverage include:
- Most Barr Investigators have followed their Barr Awards with so-called "R01" awards from the National Institutes of Health. These are typically awards for $200,000 - $400,000 per year for 3-5 years.
- Work performed by David Rowitch, MD, PhD, on his Barr project served as the basis for a large, multi-investigator grant from the National Institutes of Health to investigate neuroscience and brain cancer. The award brought $1.7 million per year for five years to Dana-Farber Cancer Institute scientists.
- A project led by Matthew Meyerson, MD, PhD, and William Sellers, MD, to catalog cancer mutations in a family of genes called kinases was supported by $2 million from the Barr Program. Based on this work, Dr. Meyerson and his colleagues successfully competed for a $7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to create a Cancer Genome Characterization Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute. They also received a $2.5 million grant from Genentech. This 5-fold return on the Barr investment is a spectacular example of the way Barr dollars are leveraged to bring new and more effective treatments to cancer patients.
