Our wide range of funding opportunities is managed by expert funding committees. Grants are awarded through open competition and reviewed by qualified experts. Every funding application we receive goes through a robust peer review assessment which may involve an expert review panel or an interview.
The review process varies depending on the grant’s duration, cost, and priority. We use a multi-tiered peer review process to ensure scientific rigour of the projects we fund as well as alignment with our strategy.
Final funding decisions are made by our funding committees, but peer review is an invaluable part of the review process.
Learn more about how we review fundingWe ask external, independent, leading scientists, clinicians, health policy specialists and patient representatives to sit on our panels and committees to review applications.
We aim to engage the most appropriate reviewers who are competitive researchers, with expertise relevant to the applicant’s proposal. We expect all our funded researchers to participate in our peer review process.
We rely on the expertise and impartiality of our reviewers to advise us and help us make the best possible funding decisions. For this reason, we ask all our reviewers to declare any potential conflicts of interest before carrying out peer review and to treat the information contained within the application as confidential.
This helps ensure that funding decisions are not influenced by factors other than scientific merit. You will not be made aware of who has reviewed your applications unless the peer reviewer chooses to disclose this themselves.
Our reviewers also sign a confidentiality agreement, promising not to enter, input or disclose any content from funding applications into generative AI tools; or use generative AI tools in drafting, formulating or editing peer review critiques.
Read our policy on the use of generative AI tools
The key principles we always encourage our reviewers to consider are the quality of the research, the potential for translation and how the outputs will be shared within the research community to generate more great science.
Our peer reviewers assess applications according to the following general criteria:
scientific excellence
cancer relevance and impact on the field
team and research environment
resources requested
previous research outputs and expertise
whether sharing of outputs is consistent with best practice
As part of our commitment to a transparent peer review process, we publish a list of the Expert Review Panel Members who served on our panels:
Expert Review Panel members in FY2023/2024(PDF, 592 KB)
Expert Review Panel members in FY2022/2023(PDF, 281 KB)
Expert Review Panel members in FY2021/2022(PDF, 324 KB)
Our strategy shapes how we'll discover more about how cancer develops and progresses to unlock new and better ways to prevent, detect and treat it.
We fund individual projects and fellowships, large-scale team science programmes, multidisciplinary collaborations and international consortia.
If you have any questions about our peer review process, get in touch with our grants team.
