Pilot Funding

Since 2006, FCBTR has been funding competitive pilot research projects for cutting edge scientific proposals, which hope to lead the way to discovery of brain tumor cures and the development of improved brain tumor treatment modalities.


FCBTR offers a proven track record of disbursing RFA’s to all brain tumor scientists across the state, receiving an average of 15 submissions per year from multiple Florida public and private institutions. FCBTR provides funding to 3 or 4 of those per year based on a rating scale, as follows:

30% Scientific Impact

30% Innovation

25% Ability to Complete

15% Feasibility and Funding Available

The FCBTR is mandated by the State of Florida to equitably distribute $250,000 per year, to the top grants, reviewed and selected by an out-of-state external advisory board of leaders in the field.

There were 100 submissions over the past 8 years, with funding provided to 20 of those pilot grants. Awardees hailed from Florida research institutions such as UF (18 awards), FSU (2 awards), Moffit (4 awards), Scripps (2 awards), Mayo (4 awards), Univ. of Miami(4 awards) and have repeatedly borne success and return on investment by means of data acquisition that improved their competitiveness for extramural funding, resulting in NIH and other peer reviewed grants of substantial size and scope.

Many of the investigators brought new concepts, approaches and/or paradigms to brain tumor research and several of the funded projects used their results as preliminary data to successfully apply for other peer reviewed funding. 

The $2,000,000 in awards distributed by FCBTR over just the last 8 years, has returned reported research grants totaling approximately $40,000,000 to the state of Florida academic institutions.  The return on investment for the State of Florida was over $38,000,000. 

Publications from these awardees have exceeded over 240 manuscripts related to brain tumor research and many pivoting from the FCBTR pilot studies. At least 4 new INDs and 16 US Patents have been approved based on the pilot research data program.

pilot funding image