NEW FUNDING STRATEGIES ARE NEEDED FOR CPRIT.

The experience we have had with CPRIT clearly calls for new funding policies at CPRIT.  CPRIT has chosen to mimic NCI, a national organization that answer to a broad range of universities, investors and individual researcher of all colors, size, shape, and dimensions.  At a state level, the pool of Universities and potential applicants is clearly much smaller and the pool of people with powers and connections is much smaller.  The risk of cronyism and abuses is much higher.   People with University background and connections will be biased by their training, connections and prior exposure.  This is not to suggest that their choices are necessarily bad.  But by definition, being BIASED means you miss certain opportunities and perspectives that may have had a critical impact to yours programs. It is important that the new CPRIT think outside this box!  The new leadership should look at Texas as a global State that need a network of prevention ready systems where new discoveries can be quickly implemented and used.  Whether that discovery is new healthy behavior, drug or target therapy.  It needs regional relays and community network centers sharing CPRIT news,views and outlook, ready to broaden the reach of the new findings.  This conspiratory disconnected current system has no clear future and set a path to a limited impact of CPRIT. It is only good for politicians and Biotech owners.  It is not a state structure responding to state needs.  The cure should not benefit a few but a well distributed state network.

We believe that CPRIT should invest in a statewide network, distribute the wealth statewide, and relocate new biotech companies through a network of locations in the whole Texas, to dilute the club mentality prominent in Houston.  We also agree with the Democratic State Representative Craig Eiland statement: 'This was Cancer prevention research, not and Hedge fund or Venture Capital".

The current system is a prime opportunity for backdoor deals and its implementation fragmentary and disconnected because it does not own a state network.  The Citizen of the lone Star state have been duped into signing for a few university funding source.  CPRIT should have had regional offices, with regional competitions throughout the entire state, not 3 cities taking 80 percent of state money!   Were is the fairness.  All the Biotech companies coming to the State  should not go into 3 cities. Work benefit distribution is unequal and only political power towns are benefiting.   There are tissue banks in Houston unknown to most people in Texas including researchers in the field.  Why?  information is not flowing through a network which does not exist.  Only CPRIT office workers know about these banks!

Reviewers coming from outside the State may provide an independent scientific opinion but how do they know enough about the need and impact of such program in a specific location.  Is need of community an important criteria for a prevention program?  How does an outsider evaluate such a need?

Suffice is to say that we need to take advantage of this pause to reshape and reload for a greater impact or larger CPRIT foot print in Texas!