Dr Graham Burdge, Reader in Human Nutrition at the University of Southampton is well acquainted with the prestigious World Cancer Research Fund Grant process.
The Editor-in-Chief of the British Journal of Nutrition and of the Journal of Nutritional Science was a former World Cancer research Fund grant-holder and is now a Panel member, helping to decide which projects will receive funding to further cancer prevention research and lead to a world where no one develops a preventable cancer.
Here he talks about how the grant was crucial to helping him explore cancer prevention and observing how others are tackling the disease…
On receiving the grant
Dr Graham Burdge, a panel member of World Cancer Research Fund
My grant enabled me to test in detail ideas that had been developed from a series of pilot studies. It also represented the first step in what I hope will be a series of studies that will develop ideas based upon basic science into dietary recommendations for the synthetic vitamin folic acid.
Although this process will take several years, obtaining the funding for the first study is critical to convert ideas into scientific evidence on which the subsequent work will be based.
However, this is usually the most difficult funding to obtain because of the uncertainty of the outcome of the study. In making this award, the WCRF were generous and far thinking in recognising the potential importance of my project for cancer prevention.
Although the main ideas underlying the project provided to be correct, one aspect of the work provided negative results. Within the scope of the award, we were able to carry out experiments that we hadn’t planned originally to try to find out why this part of the project didn’t workout as we thought. The findings of these experiments provided us with new information about how folic acid might affect cancer risk that will be followed up in a subsequent grant.
The grant didn’t just benefit me – it helped widened the knowledge and experience of other researchers. One of the things that I enjoy most is giving researchers an opportunity to develop new skills and concepts at an early stage of their careers. The researcher who was employed on this project had just received his PhD in a different, but related, field. Joining the group and taking on a substantial programme of research has been an important step in his career development.
On his project
My project revolved around the link, if any, between folic acid and cancer. It is not known whether or not taking folic acid protects against or increases risk of cancer. To date, research on this topic has produced conflicting results. Clarifying this issue is important in order to be able to make appropriate nutritional recommendations, in particular to individuals who are at increased risk of cancer, who have cancer, or are recovering from the disease. The two questions that we set out to answer were whether cancer cells respond to folic acid in the same way as normal cells and if all cancer cells respond to folic acid in the same manner. Although our findings could suggest that folic acid does not affect cancer risk, further studies are needed in whole tissues before we can be confident of this conclusion.
On joining the WCRF Panel
It was good to join the WCRF panel at a time when the scope of funding for projects in basic science, in particular how nutrition and exercise affect cancer risk, was increasing.
I am a nutritional biochemist by training rather than a cancer biologist, although I have worked on cancer at various times during my career. It has been very interesting to see how ‘card carrying’ cancer biologists view nutrition and exercise from a slightly removed standpoint, and to help to shape promising projects through the feedback system that is part of the grant application peer review process.
On taking up my role, I was pleasantly surprised at the range of applications aimed at finding ways to prevent cancer and the breadth of studies that are supported by WCRF.
One encouraging development that has occurred during the past few years in which I have served on the panel is the increase in numbers of applications from non-northern hemisphere nations, including the Middle East and Africa.
However, the applications also represent a challenge for the panel in helping researchers to develop scientifically robust research programmes in countries where the infrastructure resources for scientific research may be limited, but where, for reasons that are not understood, there is a considerable burden of cancer. I will be interested to see how research into cancer prevention develops in these countries in the future.
The WCRF panel is a relatively small group compared to others on which I serve. One benefit of being part of this small, friendly team is a sense of making a real contribution as an individual to the process of awarding research funding, and through this supporting the activities of the charity and so contributing to cancer prevention.
