Research funding

The US Food and Drug Administration says that the Tobacco Centers of Regulatory Science’s (TCORS) 2.0 program will continue to provide data on the following scientific domains related to its regulatory authority for tobacco products:

• Approaches that test the toxicity of tobacco smoke, aerosol, or specific constituents
• Effects of tobacco product characteristics on addiction and abuse liability
• Short- and long-term health effects of tobacco products
• Understanding of knowledge, attitudes and behaviors related to tobacco product use
• Understanding of how to effectively communicate the health effects of tobacco products
• Influences of tobacco marketing
• Understanding of the impact of potential FDA regulatory actions.

‘Findings from TCORS research are expected to inform the FDA’s mission to protect public health through regulation of the manufacture, distribution, and marketing of tobacco products,’ the FDA said in a note issued through its Center for Tobacco Products.
‘The TCORS program is one example of research supported by the Tobacco Regulatory Science Program, a partnership between FDA and NIH [National Institutes of Health] to foster tobacco regulatory research.’
Meanwhile, in the same note, the FDA said that ‘the following research investigators and organizations had been awarded TCORS for fiscal years 2018-2022’:

• Thomas E. Eissenberg. Ph.D., and Alison Breland, Ph.D., Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond
• Stanton A. Glantz, Ph.D., University of California-San Francisco
• Stephen T. Higgins, Ph.D., University of Vermont and State Agriculture College, Burlington
• Suchitra Krishnan-Sarin, Ph.D., and Stephanie S. O’Malley, Ph.D., Yale University, New Haven
• Rafael Meza, Ph.D., and David T. Levy, Ph.D., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
• Richard J. O’Connor, Ph.D., and Maciej Goniewicz, Ph.D., PharmD., Roswell Park Cancer Institute Corporation, Buffalo
• Mary Ann Pentz, Ph.D., and Adam M. Leventhal, Ph.D., University of Southern California, Los Angeles
• Rose M. Robertson, M.D., and Aruni Bhatnagar, Ph.D., American Heart Association, Dallas
• Andrew A. Strasser, Ph.D., and Cristine Delnevo, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

Awarded by the NIH with funding from FDA, this second round of TCORS represented a significant investment in federally funded research, with more than $151 million total funding planned for the next five years, the FDA said.
‘With co-ordination from NIH’s Office of Disease Prevention, these awards are administered by three NIH institutes — the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute,’ it said.