The Directors: Byrd & Chapman on avoiding catastrophism and using bridge funding to keep labs open

In recent months, several directors of cancer centers, appearing on The Directors segment of The Cancer Letter Podcast, mentioned that their institutions are increasingly providing small grants—typically in the range of $50,000—to scientists to enable them to keep their labs open. Andrew Chapman, director of the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson, said he and other officials at Jefferson designed a bridge funding mechanism that applies to oncology as well as to other therapeutic areas. John Byrd, director of UPMC Hillman Cancer Center, said bridge funding at his institution was started by Kathryn Schmitz, who served as the interim director before he started his job last November. Chapman and Byrd appeared together on The Directors, a monthly podcast series that focuses on the problems that keep directors of cancer centers up at night. The extent of reliance on bridge funding at NCI grantee institutions hasn’t been studied systematically, but in recent months, it has come up regularly on The Directors. As cancer centers strategize amid this time of uncertainty, many are tapping into their resources to keep their labs and federally-funded programs going—in essence becoming short-term lenders to the government and placing a bet that the money will soon begin to flow. This may be a sound strategy if the problem is limited to temporary constriction of federal funds—and assuming that Congress will continue to provide robust funding to NIH and NCI.