NCI Awards Cancer Moonshot℠ Grants in Five Areas of Precision Medicine Oncology

With the goal of advancing health and treatments for disease through research that considers the molecular makeup of each person’s tumor, in September 2016, DCTD funded fifty-three 1-year supplements to already funded grants in six strategic areas of precision medicine oncology (PMO). Building upon these supplements, NCI’s Board of Scientific Advisors (BSA) approved five concepts in PMO in October 2016. Subsequently, Funding Opportunity Announcements (FOAs) that align with efforts of the Cancer Moonshot and relate to the following five PMO areas were released: canine immunotherapy trials, pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma microenvironment, immunoprofiling and biomarkers, treatment resistance, and patient-derived xenograft models.

In response to these FOAs, the following Cancer Moonshot grants were funded in September 2017:

Canine Immunotherapy Trials and Correlative Studies (U01)
Coordinating Center for Canine Immunotherapy Trials and Correlative Studies (U24)

Activity Code	PI(s)	Grant Title	Lead Institution
U01	Robert Canter (contact); Robert Rebhun	Enhancing Natural Killer Immunotherapy with First-in-Dog Trials of Inhaled Recombinant IL-15 and Super-agonist IL-15 in Naturally Occurring Canine Cancers	University of California at Davis
U01	M. R. Chambers	Canine Immuno Neurotherapeutics	University of Alabama at Birmingham
U01	Steven Dow (contact); Cheryl London	Optimizing Novel Immunotherapy Combinations Targeting the Tumor Microenvironment in Canine Spontaneous Osteosarcoma	Colorado State University
U01	Cheryl London (contact); Kristy Richards	Enhancing the Efficacy of Immunotherapy in DLBCL using Rational Combination Approaches	Tufts University
U01	Grace Elizabeth Pluhar	Novel Combined Immunotherapeutic Strategies for Glioma: Using Pet Dogs as a Large Animal Spontaneous Model	University of Minnesota
U24	Nicola Mason (contact); Kathleen Propert	Coordinating Center for Canine Immunotherapy trials and Correlative Studies	University of Pennsylvania

Consortium for Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma (PDAC) Translational Studies on the Tumor Microenvironment (U01)
Resource Center for the Consortium for Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma (PDAC) Translational Studies (U24)

Activity Code	PI(s)	Grant Title	Lead Institution
U01	Vinod Balachandran	Defining Neoantigen Immunodominance for Antigen Selection and Biomarker Discovery in Human Pancreatic Cancer Immunotherapy	Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research
U01	Howard Crawford	Interrupting Cellular Crosstalk in the Immunosuppressive Microenvironment of Pancreas Cancer	University of Michigan
U01	William Hahn	Systematic Interrogation of the Pancreatic Cancer Microenvironment in Patient-Derived Specimens	Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
U01	Sunil Hingorani	Disrupting the Immune and Drug-Privileged Microenvironment in Pancreas Cancer	Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
U01	Rakesh Jain	Reprogramming PDAC Tumor Microenvironment to Improve Immunotherapy	Massachusetts General Hospital
U24	Ignacio Wistuba	Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma Translational Resource Center (PATReC)	University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

Cancer Immune Monitoring and Analysis Centers (CIMACs) (U24)
Cancer Immunologic Data Common (CIDC) (U24)

Activity Code	PI(s)	Grant Title	Lead Institution
U24	Sacha Gnjatic	High-Dimensional Immune Monitoring of NCI-Supported Immunotherapy Trials	Precision Immunology Institute and the Tisch Cancer Institute at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
U24	Holden Maecker (contact); Sean Bendall	Immune Monitoring and Analysis of Cancer at Stanford (IMACS)	Stanford Cancer Institute
U24	Ignacio Wistuba (contact); Chantale Bernatchez; Elizabeth Mittendorf	Translational Cancer Immune Monitoring and Analysis Center (TCIMAC)	University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
U24	Catherine Wu (contact); Frank Hodi	Cancer Immune Monitoring and Analysis Center	Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
U24	X. Shirley Liu (contact); Ethan Cerami	Cancer Immunologic Data Commons	Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Mechanisms of Cancer Drug Resistance and Sensitivity (U54)

Activity Code	PI(s)	Grant Title	Lead Institution
U54	Trever Bivona (contact); Calvin Kuo	Bay Area Team against Resistance	University of California, San Francisco
U54	Ryan Bruce Corcoran	An Integrated Translational Approach to Overcome Drug Resistance	Massachusetts General Hospital
U54	Charles Sawyers	The MSKCC-UW Fred Hutch Prostate Cancer Drug Resistance and Sensitivity Center	Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
U54	Alexander Keith Stewart	Overcoming Drug Resistance in Multiple Myeloma	Mayo Clinic Arizona
U54	Jeffrey Tyner (contact); Brain Druker	Tumor Intrinsic and Microenvironmental Mechanisms Driving Drug Combination Efficacy and Resistance in AMIL	Oregon Health & Science University

PDX Development and Trial Centers (PDTCs) (U54)
PDX Data Commons and Coordinating Center (PDCCC) for the PDX Development and Trial Centers Research Network (PDXNet) (U24)

Activity Code	PI(s)	Grant Title	Lead Institution
U54	Ramaswamy Govindan (contact); Shunqiang Li; Li Ding	Washington University PDX Development and Trial Center	Washington University
U54	Meenhard Herlyn	Rational Approaches to Melanoma Therapy	The Wistar Institute
U54	Jack Roth (contact); Funda Meric-Bernstam	University of Texas PDX Development and Trial Center	University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
U54	Alana Welm (contact); Bryan Welm; Michael Lewis	PDX Trial Center for Breast Cancer Therapy	University of Utah
U24	Jeffrey Chuang (contact); Brandi Davis-Dusenbery	Data Coordination Center for PDX Net	The Jackson Laboratory