Years of flat funding from the National Institutes of Health plus across-the-board federal spending cuts known as sequestration could have deleterious effects for cancer research, says a new study by the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR).
While cancer treatment has seen incredible progress in recent years because of advances in genomics research, weakening federal investment could adversely affect the ability of scientists to carry out current research projects, reduce the number of new grant proposals that the National Cancer Institute can support and result in fewer job opportunities young researchers entering the field.
According to the AACR report, the amount of annual funding for NIH has been less than what is needed to keep pace with biomedical inflation. In the late 1990s, following a period of stagnant budgets, Congress ramped up medical research funding for 5 years. But in the 10 years since the doubling ended in 2003, the NIH budget has been steadily shrinking.
On top of that, the sequester cuts rolled out in March 2013 slashed the NIH budget by $1.6 billion, just over 5%. The impact to the National Cancer Institute was a cutback of $239 million, according to the AACR report, which was presented to Congress March 13.
"Despite the $1 billion in funds that were restored to the NIH and NCI in January, these agencies' budgets remain far below what they were in fiscal year 2012 because of sequestration. And when taking into account medical inflation, NIH's ability to fund lifesaving research has been cut by more than 20% over the past decade," AACR CEO Dr. Margaret Foti said in a statement.
The report found that at the reduced fiscal year 2013 funding level of $29 billion, the NIH is now funding the lowest number of research projects since fiscal year 2001.
The AACR said that support for biomedical research translates directly to improvements in care for patients, citing 13 new cancer drug approvals in the past 18 months and 6 new drug indications for different types of cancer. In addition, there are now 41 FDA-approved therapies that target specific molecules involved in cancer, compared with 17 target therapies 5 ago and just 5 a decade ago.
- read the full report (PDF)