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The Mark Foundation Endeavor Awards support collaborative research projects that bring together investigators with diverse areas of expertise to tackle challenges in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer. These grants are awarded to teams of three or more investigators to generate and integrate data from diverse lines of research and transform those insights into advances for cancer patients that could not be achieved by individual efforts. A description of the teams granted Endeavor Awards in 2023 can be found here.

Principal Investigator (PI) – 1 per team

• Serves as the single point of contact with MFCR during the application process and the grant period.
• The LOA will be executed solely with the PI’s institution.
• Must meet all criteria of a co-PI listed below.
• Does not need to be the most senior member of the team.

Co-Principal Investigator (co-PI) – 2 to 8 per team

• Lab receives at least 10% of the total grant budget.
• Core member of the team leadership.
• Designated as key personnel in the LOA.
• Must have an independent faculty research appointment (tenure-track or equivalent).

Collaborator – optional

• Lab receives 0-10% of the budget.
• Can provide resources, perform experiments, analyses, etc.
• Serves as a project consultant or advisor rather than a team leader.

LOIs are to be submitted through The Mark Foundation’s online grants portal. The LOI will require the following information:

• Principal Investigator name, institution, title, contact info
• Project Title
• Project Summary/Abstract – limit 350 words
• Project Description – limit 5 pages, including figures and tables but excluding literature references
  • Specific Aims
  • Introduction, background, and description of unmet need
  • Research plan broken into Aims, with each Aim having:
    • Clear objective
    • Preliminary studies if applicable
    • High-level description of the experimental approach
    • Milestones and timelines
  • Future directions – if the research plan is successful, what is the 5-10-year vision for expansion of the project?
  • Literature cited (does not count against page limit)
• Team Description
  • List all co-Principal Investigators (co-PIs), and collaborators (name, institution, title, contact info)
  • For the PI and co-PIs, provide the following:
    • 1-3 sentences describing their role in the project.
    • Biosketch (NIH or similar format preferred; limit 5 pages per investigator)
  • List any existing collaborations between co-PIs, including existing funding support for collaborative projects.
• Collaborative Science Statement – limit 1 page
  • Why is this project a team science project? Describe how the output of the individual investigators (data, samples, hypotheses, compounds, etc.) will be integrated and/or shared in a way that makes the impact of the project as a whole larger than the sum of its parts.
  • How will the team work together? Describe the plan for team structure, communications, and shared resources.
• Budget overview – On the template provided.