In Fiscal Year 1993, Congressional direction precipitated the formation of the EPSCoR Interagency Coordinating Committee (EICC). The Committee on Appropriations of the United States Senate, in reporting out the Fiscal Year of 1993 Veterans, Housing and Urban Development, and Independent Agencies Appropriations Act, page 161,
"direct(ed) the [National Science] Foundation .....[to] produce... a plan to integrate all [Experimental Programs to Stimulate Competitive Research] EPSCoR programs into a single unified effort to maximize the taxpayers investment in this effort."
A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed by the cognizant officials of those agencies with EPSCoR or EPSCoR-like programs agreeing to participate in an EPSCoR Interagency Coordinating Committee. The agencies included: the Department of Defense (DOD), Department of Energy (DOE), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The EICC serves as a working group which meets on a regular basis to achieve the following objectives:
Coordinate Federal EPSCoR and EPSCoR-like programs on the impact of Federal support while eliminating duplication in states receiving EPSCoR support from more than one agency.
Coordinate agency objectives with state and institutional goals, where appropriate, to obtain continued non-federal support of S&T research and training.
Coordinate the development of criteria to assess gains in academic research quality and competitiveness and S&T human resource development.
Furthermore, as members of the EICC, the agencies agreed to exchange information on pending legislation, agency policies, and relevant programs related to S&T research and training and, when appropriate, to provide responses on issues of common concern.
As the lead agency within the Federal-wide EPSCoR effort, National Science Foundation staff were designated to serve as the Chair and Executive Secretary of the EICC. Membership of the EICC is found on the NSF EPSCoR web site.
Projects span the use of novel diagnostic and
therapeutic radioisotopes for cancer and infectious diseases. WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $1 million in funding for three awards to advance research and development (R&D) to translate newly developed radioisotopes into evaluation for potential use in preclinical and clinical trials. This funding is part of a key federal program that produces
critical isotopes otherwise unavailable or in short supply for U.S. science, medicine, and industry. While this program is administered by the DOE, assessment of submitted proposals was done in coordination with the National Institutes of Health. Radioisotopes, or atoms that have excess energy in their nucleus, are used in medical diagnostic procedures to
study otherwise imperceptible dynamic processes occurring in various parts of the human body. Radioisotope-based diagnostic procedures offer significant advantages over standard X-ray technologies. Select radioisotopes have also been effectively used for decades to treat certain diseases, and many more have demonstrated efficacy in therapeutic medical procedures, such as in the treatment of cancer and infectious disease. “The
novel isotopes produced by the DOE Isotope Program can enable transformative approaches to cancer treatments with levels of efficacy that have not been seen before, as well as innovative technologies for imaging of disease and the human body,” said Jehanne Gillo, Director of the DOE Isotope Program. “It is essential to advance these isotopes for use in preclinical and clinical trials, as they have potentially enormous benefits to the field of modern medicine.”
Topics funded seek to address key challenges associated with the advancement of therapeutic radioisotopes, which hold the promise of treating cancer and infectious disease with extreme precision – in some cases down to a single cell. One topic investigates the design of new chemical agents to trap and hold the Auger electron emitter, antimony-119. Auger electron emitters hold incredible promise because they deposit their decay
energy over a distance less than one-half the diameter of a human cell. Success could mean understanding the therapeutic potential of the isotope. A second topic funded investigates a diagnostic radioisotope analogue, cerium-134, to the highly promising therapeutic alpha-emitter, actinium-225. This type of study will allow clinicians to determine where an isotope will go in the body once injected, how much will go there, and, in many cases, how much will be needed based on the size of the
disease burden encountered.
The projects were selected by competitive peer review under the DOE Funding Opportunity Announcement for FOA 2532: Advancing Novel Medical Isotopes for Clinical Trials and in cooperation with the National Institutes of Health.
Total funding is $1 million for awards lasting up to two years in duration, with a total of $1 million in Fiscal Year 2022 dollars and outyear funding contingent on congressional appropriations for both awards. The list of awards and more information can be found here.