Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research

About

Introduction

The prospects for bringing cancer under control will only improve through an ongoing commitment to innovative basic and clinical research. In response, the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR) engages leading scientists and clinicians in an integrated effort to understand and confront the global challenge of cancer. With nine Branches in seven countries across Australasia, Europe, and North and South America, and numerous Affiliates in many other countries, the scientific network that is LICR quite literally covers the globe. LICR is not only associated with established and distinguished academic institutions, but has also, through its James R. Kerr Program, expanded its activities into countries, such as China, Russia, Ukraine, South Africa, and Turkey, which are scientifically talented but have had little opportunity for international collaboration in cancer research.

LICR is distinguishable from other cancer research institutes, not only by its size and global reach, but also by two fundamental attributes: its reliable, long-term funding perspective and the fact that it takes responsibility for the entire discovery continuum from the laboratory to the clinic.

A limitation of the traditional academic cancer research model is that funding is fragmented, overlapping and lacks strategic coordination. Universities and research institutes usually are not themselves able to finance a significant portion of the research conducted on their campuses. Rather, grants made directly to the individual investigators for individual projects are the principal source of funding for academic research. Consequently, the capacity of universities and institutes to influence the content or character of the work carried out by their faculty, or to bring together individuals or laboratories to create a larger, more synergistic research endeavor is diminished. The result is a system in which the research undertaken is predominantly defined by what can be achieved in a single laboratory within a funding cycle of, typically, three years. Though this research funding model has been effective, it supports a rather narrow range of disjointed activity. It does not encourage collaborative and coordinated undertakings or enable longer term, broad scale initiatives. In contrast, LICR funds over 70% of the cost of the research that it conducts. Though its most basic science is investigator-initiated, LICR encourages, enables and brings together multidisciplinary teams of investigators to tackle larger, more complex cancer challenges.

Many universities and academic research institutes lack the expertise, infrastructure and resources to take their laboratory discoveries into the clinic. To bridge that divide they turn their work product over to companies that engage in drug development, a process driven by commercial considerations: time to product launch and share of market captured. Between the worlds of laboratory discovery and therapeutic utility, there is a missing link that disrupts the efficient exploration of knowledge for human benefit. That missing link is clinical discovery. LICR is convinced that the same systematic, investigative rigor that yielded the laboratory discovery in the first place should be applied in early-phase clinic trials to assess fully a discovery’s therapeutic potential. It has, therefore, committed the resources and marshalled the capabilities that allow it to evaluate its promising basic discoveries in first-in-man clinical studies.

† Da Pozzo, F., Maye, I., Perriard, A.R., and von Ins, M. (2001) “List of the Worldwide Champions League of Research Institutions 1994 - 1999.” Center for Science and Technology Studies, Bern, Switzerland