Purpose
This Notice of Special Interest (NOSI) from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) announces an opportunity for administrative supplement funding to support and train early-stage surgeon scientists conducting cancer-related research and with the goal to accelerate them into an independent surgeon scientist career. The NCI will support exceptional surgeon scientists from across the United States who have not received prior substantial NIH funding to be trained together by participating in the NCI Early-stage Surgeon Scientist Program (ESSP).
Background
Overall, physician scientists have decreased from 4.7% of the workforce to 1.5% since the 1980s. Reasons cited include: relative diminished NIH funding for more than 2 decades, economic pressures to be clinically productive, excessive administrative responsibilities, difficulty obtaining extramural funding, and desire for work-life balance. However, physician scientists are the key to transforming patient care. They can maximally leverage their clinical acumen to identify underlying biology and address clinical needs.
Surgeons are particularly challenged as surgeon scientists by the need to remain surgically active, operating and seeing patients in clinic, by the fact that hospital margins are dependent upon procedure-based medicine, and that NIH salary caps do not account for surgeon salaries. And, yet, they have made many transformative scientific discoveries.
Overall Goal
The overall goal of this program is to train surgeon scientists and retain them in cancer research by supporting a program focused on cancer-related disease and basic/translational research. This program aims to bring together surgeon scientists from across the United States and build cohorts that will be trained together for up to three years per cohort. Participants in the Early-stage Surgeon Scientist Program (ESSP-Participants or Participants) from the extramural community will be selected via a competitive process after submitting an administrative supplement application for a P30 Cancer Center Support grant or U54 Comprehensive Partnerships to Advance Cancer Health Equity (CPACHE) program grant. NCI Intramural surgeon scientists may also apply to participate in the program. Timelines and milestones will be tracked for Participants for 1) manuscript submissions, 2) grant proposal submissions and obtaining additional funding, 3) national presentations, and 4) progress reports. Each participant will be advised by a mentoring committee consisting of content experts from academic medical centers and the NCI and NIH. The second and third years of support for participants will be contingent on achieving sufficient progress towards these milestones, as described below. In addition, annual surveys of Participants and their mentors will be used to improve program organization, educational sessions, and outcome metrics.