The American Cancer Society (ACS) awarded an additional $50,000 each in supplemental funding to University of Illinois Cancer Center members Pam Ganschow, MD, and Kent Hoskins, MD, to support their Illinois Cancer Health Equity Research (I-CHER) Center projects.
Ganschow’s team is examining solutions to improve the identification of people at high risk for cancer and increase equitable delivery of cancer prevention services. This additional funding will allow them to bring on a navigator who will administer a risk assessment tool for patients at project intervention sites.
Hoskins’ team is developing a multimedia decision aid for Black women diagnosed with breast cancer to increase awareness about clinical trial participation and facilitate shared decision-making in an effort to improve diversity in clinical trials. This additional funding will allow the team to produce a video of higher production value similar to what is typically seen on commercial media outlets, to hire a professional writer to create the script for the intervention script, and to conduct focus groups with a national audience to ensure cultural appropriateness and saliency of the themes incorporated into the script.
About Supplemental Funding
ACS invited them to apply for the funding to support the addition of activities, materials or resources that fell within the scope of their current projects but that were not initially included in the grant application, giving priority to projects entering their third year as they are.
The I-CHER Center is made possible with funding from the American Cancer Society (ACS) and support from the Cancer Center. The I-CHER Center on the UIC campus was 1 of 4 four Minority Serving Institutions that shared in more than $16 million in grants awarded by the ACS, beginning in January 2022, to establish Cancer Health Equity Research (CHER) Centers. The others were the University of Arizona, Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, and Howard University in Washington, D.C. Each institution received a four-year grant of $4.08 million.