Brain-Tumor Research to Get $6-Million From Alliance of Charities and Foundations

Frustrated by slow progress in the fight against brain cancer, eight charities and foundations have joined forces to provide up to $6-million in grants for research projects that explore new ways of treating the deadly disease.

“We’ve really come together to amplify the community’s dissatisfaction with the progress of research, the pace of research, the nature of the research of treatments,” says Susan L. Weiner, vice president of grants for the Children’s Brain Tumor Foundation, in New York.

The groups are members of the Brain Tumor Funders’ Collaborative, which decided to offer the joint grants after two years of holding workshops with research scientists. Other members are the American Brain Tumor Association, in Des Plaines, Ill.; the Brain Tumour Foundation of Canada, in London, Ontario; the Brain Tumor Society, in Watertown, Mass.; the Goldhirsh Foundation, in Branford, Conn.; the James S. McDonnell Foundation, in St. Louis; the National Brain Tumor Foundation, in San Francisco; and the Sontag Foundation, in Jacksonville, Fla.

Malignant brain tumors, or gliomas, are almost always fatal, despite years of research aimed at combating them.

“It’s not that people haven’t tried, it’s not because of lack of effort,” says Rita Berkson, executive director of the Goldhirsh Foundation, which was founded by the magazine entrepreneur Bernard Goldhirsh in 2000 after he was diagnosed with brain cancer. He died of the disease in 2003.

However, the groups say progress has been stymied by the aggressive nature of gliomas, difficulties in delivering drugs to the brain, and the inability to turn promising laboratory results and animal experiments into treatments that work on people.

The collaborative is seeking proposals from multidisciplinary research teams that have fresh ideas about how to battle brain cancer in both adults and children — for example, by drawing on genomics (the study of genes), complex systems biology, and informatics. The group will award up to three $2-million grants for research projects of three to five years. More information is available at http://www.braintumorfunders.org.