Million dollar prize aims to lure new cancer ideas

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Medical researchers teamed up with hedge fund managers on Wednesday to offer a new million-dollar prize for the best new idea for cancer research in the hopes of kick-starting innovative approaches.

They invited cancer experts, scientists and the general public to join an Internet-based club and compete for the Gotham Prize for Cancer Research.

Federal funding of cancer research has been flat, and is in fact lower than in recent years when inflation is taken into account, said Dr. Gary Curhan of Harvard Medical School.

And the system of seeking grants -- money to do research -- is based around pleasing either National Institutes of Health supervisors or gatekeepers at the advocacy organizations that pay for research on specific types of cancer, he said.

Curhan teamed up with hedge fund managers Joel Greenblatt and Robert Goldstein of private investment firm Gotham Capital to set up the prize club, found at www.gothamprize.org/.

"The goal here is to open up the site to people with ideas," Curhan told reporters in a telephone briefing.

"The winners of these prizes are not going to be those who are successful in evaluating the idea. It is going to be the person with the best idea."

Members post an essay or thesis outlining their ideas. Cancer researchers will be invited to peruse the ideas. At the end of the year cancer experts such as Dr. Bert Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins University, one of the best-known researchers in colon cancer and cancer genes, will judge the entries.