CAPRI: Columbia Cancer Research Training Program for Resident-Investigators

Project Summary/Abstract This is a proposal to fund an established post-doctoral training program called the Columbia Cancer Research Training Program for Resident-Investigators (CAPRI) focused on training physician-scientists in translational cancer medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC). Over the past 5 years and with ongoing institutional support for our CAPRI program, we have trained 11 resident-investigators (RIs) from 6 different clinical departments, including 2 residents from underrepresented minoritized (URM) backgrounds. For this resubmission, we will expand CAPRI from 2 to 4 RIs per year and we will focus on the largest residency programs with the majority not having built-in research years. We have successfully recruited residents from multiple disciplines and leveraged the resources of the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center (HICCC) at CUIMC, including 36 NIH-funded faculty in basic, clinical/translational, and population sciences and the rich training environment. With the ongoing expansion and institutional commitment to oncology, we have added over 20 independent investigators to our pool of research preceptors (RPs) who will provide direct supervision of the trainees. Through new leadership at CUIMC, the thematic research areas of our Cancer Center focus on precision medicine and cancer health disparities. Recent initiatives, such as the HICCC Cancer Research Training and Education Coordination (CRTEC) core, provide additional opportunities for training and career enhancement activities for resident-investigators. In order to increase diversity in the academic workforce, we have specifically added a Committee for Diversity Enhancement to foster these efforts within CAPRI. The principal aim of CAPRI is to provide comprehensive training in the design and conduct of state-of-the-art research to highly motivated physicians (MD or MD-PhD) dedicated to academic careers in clinical cancer medicine. With an emphasis on multi-disciplinary team science, our goal is to facilitate the development of translational researchers drawn from 5 CUIMC residency programs, including Medicine, Pathology, Pediatrics, Radiation Oncology, and Surgery. CAPRI will provide RIs with the advanced skills necessary to: 1. Design and conduct rigorous hypothesis-driven research that encompasses the cancer care continuum of prevention, screening, diagnosis, treatment, survivorship, and palliative care with the goals of reducing morbidity and mortality from this disease and reducing health disparities; 2. Translate promising pre-clinical and observational findings into cancer clinical trials that prospectively evaluate biological and clinical endpoints, and 3. Conduct clinical cancer research in a multi-disciplinary team setting in which physician-scientists, basic scientists, and population scientists collaborate and interact to expedite and accelerate the translation of research findings into the clinical setting.