Authors' Affiliations: Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland; Office of Public Health Genomics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia; Scientific Consulting Group, Inc., Gaithersburg, Maryland; and Stanford Prevention Research Center, Department of Medicine, and Department of Public Health and Policy, Stanford University School of Medicine, and Department of Statistics, Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford, California.
Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev. 2013 Dec;22(12):2148-60. doi: 10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-13-0591. Epub 2013 Sep 17.
During the last two decades, epidemiology has undergone a rapid evolution toward collaborative research. The proliferation of multi-institutional, interdisciplinary consortia has acquired particular prominence in cancer research. Herein, we describe the characteristics of a network of 49 established cancer epidemiology consortia (CEC) currently supported by the Epidemiology and Genomics Research Program (EGRP) at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). This collection represents the largest disease-based research network for collaborative cancer research established in population sciences. We describe the funding trends, geographic distribution, and areas of research focus. The CEC have been partially supported by 201 grants and yielded 3,876 publications between 1995 and 2011. We describe this output in terms of interdisciplinary collaboration and translational evolution. We discuss challenges and future opportunities in the establishment and conduct of large-scale team science within the framework of CEC, review future prospects for this approach to large-scale, interdisciplinary cancer research, and describe a model for the evolution of an integrated Network of Cancer Consortia optimally suited to address and support 21st-century epidemiology.
在过去的二十年中，流行病学经历了快速的向协作研究的演变。多机构、跨学科联盟的扩散在癌症研究中尤为突出。在此，我们描述了目前由美国国家癌症研究所（NCI）的流行病学和基因组学研究计划（EGRP）支持的 49 个已建立的癌症流行病学联盟（CEC）网络的特点。该集合代表了在人群科学中为协作癌症研究建立的最大的基于疾病的研究网络。我们描述了资助趋势、地理分布和研究重点领域。CEC 已部分得到 201 项赠款的支持，并在 1995 年至 2011 年间产生了 3876 篇出版物。我们根据跨学科合作和转化演变来描述这一产出。我们讨论了在 CEC 框架内建立和开展大规模团队科学的挑战和未来机会，回顾了这种大规模、跨学科癌症研究方法的未来前景，并描述了一个适合解决和支持 21 世纪流行病学的综合癌症联盟网络的演变模型。
