New cancer Pioneer Award for revolutionary ideas

The Pioneer Award aims to attract innovative ideas from a wide range of investigators - regardless of whether they have a traditional biomedical cancer research background, or come from other disciplines such as physics, engineering, social and behavioural sciences, technology, software or app development.

The Pioneer Award will fund grants up to the value of £200,000 over two years.

The aim is to encourage revolutionary thinking from a broad pool of researchers. Funded projects will take new approaches to unanswered research questions, with the potential to make progress in cancer research.

A committee of experts from a range of disciplines spanning academia and industry will initially score applications anonymously, so they can judge proposals according to the quality of the idea rather than the applicants' track record. Final funding decisions will be made via a pitch to the committee.

Applications will be considered throughout the year, and the decision-making process will operate much faster than more traditional funding schemes.

David Scott, Cancer Research UK's director of science funding, said: "We're delighted to launch the Pioneer Award, which opens up Cancer Research UK's funding to researchers from all sectors, to inspire novel ideas to help better understand, diagnose, treat and prevent cancer.

"We're looking for fresh, innovative ideas that might not ordinarily receive research funding, to tackle the most challenging problems using pioneering approaches.

"We're being ambitious and thinking big - in the hope that this will inspire exciting new research proposals that will ultimately help us beat cancer sooner."

Source: Cancer Research UK