Obtaining cancer research funding can be trying. Often, seeking money for research is a matter of pleasing supervisors of National Institutes of Health or appeasing gatekeepers of advocacy groups.

A new prize, however, is offering $1 million annually to encourage innovative cancer treatment research. The Gotham Prize was established in May by two hedge fund managers and a doctor from Harvard Medical School. In addition to the $1 million prize, there is also a stipend of $250,000 available for research in pediatric oncology.

The first winner was Alexander Varshavsky, the Smits Professor of Cell Biology at California Institute of Technology. His novel idea is called deletion-specific targeting, based on DNA that is missing from tumor cells but found in normal healthy cells.

"(It) involves, in a nutshell, the finding of a genuine Achilles Heel of cancer cells, i.e., their potentially vulnerable feature that won't change during tumor progression," Varshavsky said in a statement. "A deletion-specific targeting-based drug is envisioned as a sophisticated molecular device that enters a cell, 'examines' it for the presence of cancer-specific DNA deletions, and thereafter 'decides' whether it entered a cancer cell, in which case the drug activates its warhead and kills that cell," he added.

The founders of the Gotham Prize hope to establish an exchange of ideas about cancer that will help researchers think outside the box.