These workshops will include a select international delegation of cancer researchers along with scientists from India who will try to identify questions that highlight important areas of cancer research that are understudied or forgotten. These will be held on October 27-29, 2014 in Delhi; October 30-November 1, 2014 in Bangalore; and November 3-5, 2014 in Trivandrum.

DBT has been funding Cancer Research along with other funding departments for over two decades now. Several specific calls for proposals have been issued, however there are many grey areas including in India specific cancers that need special attention by the research community to provide better diagnosis, preventive strategies, therapeutics and palliative care.

The best of these questions will be presented to the research community as part of a Request for Applications (RFA) in which scientists can apply for funding to answer some facet of the provocative question. The Indian workshops' activities will seek to develop a set of questions from which the best will be offered for one or more RFAs sponsored by various groups within the Indian government and the NCI.

The Indian workshops' activities will seek to develop a set of questions from which one or more RFAs jointly sponsored by NCI and DBT may emerge.

The collaborative process of formulating the provocative questions in cancer has been experimented upon by the NCI- NIH; it resulted into identifying many crucial questions that resulted into invited research proposals. It is now aimed to engage the NCI's scientific community in serious debate with Indian cancer researchers and energize them & other constituencies (advocacy groups, health professionals, Members of Congress, and others) about the prospects for improving the welfare of cancer patients through research. Other constituencies are encouraged to take part in the "Provocative Questions" enterprise through discussions and activities.

The format of PQW would include a select international delegation of cancer researchers along with scientists from India suggesting and discussing Provocative Questions in style to the ongoing research planning effort being led by the NCI. For the last three years NCI has led an effort to identify questions that highlight important areas of cancer research that are understudied or forgotten.

The recent technological advances worldwide, in various area of cancer especially genomics, molecular biology, and computational sciences has opened fresh avenues for research. Humungous transformation has been achieved in the basic knowledge about the genetic and biochemical aspects of cancer research by which they arise. Now there is an opportunity for us to take a step back from the momentum of these discoveries and make sure we have left no stone unturned and no important but perhaps non-obvious question left unexplored.