ESUN

The Liddy Shriver Sarcoma Initiative's Research Grants Program

By Bruce Shriver, PhD
Editor-in-Chief, ESUN

The Liddy Shriver Sarcoma Initiative awards grants to research institutes, hospitals and medical centers worldwide. We fund quality sarcoma research wherever it is done, and we encourage grant applications that involve collaboration among institutions and across national boundaries as well as between departments within an institution. Applications are peer-reviewed by four to six specialists in sarcoma in a process that typically takes four to five months.

When a grant is awarded, we publish the name of the investigator(s), his/her/their institution(s), the amount of the grant and a detailed description of the investigator’s experimental plans. We also require a report of the results to be published at the end of the grant period. Thus, both the experimental plan and the research results are published in ESUN in an open, publically accessible way.

We are proud of the level of transparency and accountability involved in our grant review process. To put it simply, we believe that donors have the right to know exactly how their money is used, and we use ESUN to accomplish this. We are also proud that 97-98% of all of the funds that we receive to support sarcoma research go directly to that research (we only have a 2-3% overhead).

Our grants are not intended to support the salary of the investigator, nor do they support the administrative or indirect costs of the investigator's institution. Grant applications that span two years of funding ($100,000 or $50,000) are considered, but the need for two years to conduct the study must be clearly justified in the proposal. The applicant's primary affiliation must be with a nonprofit institution. A signed copy of the grant application along with the letter of compliance with these terms must be sent to us in order to enter the application into the grant review process.

We often reach out to other sarcoma advocacy groups to help fund studies, as this stretches both our funds and their funds. The Amschwand Sarcoma Cancer Foundation, Brian Morden Foundation, Foster Foundation, Leiomyosarcoma Direct Research Foundation, and the Reid R. Sacco Memorial Foundation have all helped fund studies that have been recommended for funding via our peer-review process.

We would like to invite interested researchers to write to us to receive more information about applying for a grant.