The NCI seems to be taking this new initiative pretty seriously. Here’s a quote about it from the
Director’s Update:

“NCI’s third signature initiative is one that is personally extremely exciting and I daresay another bold answer to the President’s challenge to expand the boundaries of science. Over a year ago now, NCI commenced a series of workshops that began to bring aspects of the physical sciences to the problem of cancer. We discussed how physical laws governing short-range and other forces, energy flows, gradients, mechanics, and thermodynamics affect cancer, and how the theories of Darwinian and somatic evolution can better help us understand and control cancer.

From those meetings has come an idea that is soon to become a network of NCI-supported physical sciences-oncology centers. Working closely with the cancer research community, these centers will foster a team science environment that incubates and tests novel cancer concepts by studying and sometimes challenging accepted scientific dogma. These centers will, I believe, be proof yet again that approaching a difficult scientific problem from a new perspective can advance all research. These new centers will interface exceptionally well with our very successful centers in nanobiology, proteomics, and systems biology.”

To back up the lip service NCI has committed $75M – $105M over five years on this program. And while it seems on the surface of things that this is about applying the study of physics to oncology, it’s really more general and interdisciplinary than that. If you read the grant submission overview page there are four main focus areas that they are looking at:

• Physics
  
• Evolution
  
• Information Theory
  
• Complexity

In my opinion, these are pretty good focus areas. And the goal of fostering collaboration is a great one, despite the challenges in of true collaboration in the current scientific research climate.

More info can be found on physics.cancer.gov.

hat tip: Daniel Horowitz