Celebrating Four Years of CARG under the R21/R33 Grant

2022 marks the fifth year of CARG’s growth with the support of the National Institute of Health/National Institute of Aging (NIH/NIA) R21/R33 grant. As we reflect on this anniversary, it’s a good time to celebrate CARG’s growth as it forges ahead with new innovations and breakthroughs.

CARG has come a long way towards building the field through research, mentorship, and dissemination. The R21/R33 grant has accelerated this progress in a number of ways.

Since 2018, CARG and CARG members have:

• Established six Cores (communications, clinical implementation, health services, supportive care, measures, and analytics cores), as well as the patient advocacy committee SCOREboard. CARG has received, and addressed, more than 150 public inquiries about utilizing these cores
• Grown significantly in the last 5 years, starting from 150 to more than 500 members, totalling 75 institutions and more than 20 countries.
• Submitted a total of 51 grants, including 27 successful applications, that have garnered $24.4 million in grant funding — all with the help of the newly built CARG infrastructure.
• Generated 54 mentor-mentee matches representing 43 institutions and 4 countries, through robust CARG Buddy Program, ensuring the mentorship of junior investigators in this area of research.
• Contributed to 95 publications, especially in several high impact journals, including the Lancet, JAMA Oncology, Journal for Clinical Oncology, and Cancer.

Looking Ahead
CARG leadership submitted the R33 grant renewal in July 2022, for which the team warmly thanks all the CARG members that participated in the R33 outcomes survey. And of course, the team appreciates the great work and activities all CARG members do to better the lives and care for older patients with cancer.

“The funding and the activities that have come out of the R33 grant have really helped the Cancer and Aging Research Group gain significant momentum in the field of cancer and aging in the last half decade,” says William Dale, MD, PhD, one of the three PIs for the grant along with Supriya Mohile, MD, MS and Heidi Klepin, MD, MS. “With this tremendous growth in membership and having established this wide-reaching infrastructure, this grant has helped build a solid foundation for CARG and positioned us for even greater impact in the future.”