National Cancer Institute Director Anthony Letai, M.D., Ph.D., has attempted to fight back against the “misinformation” surrounding a perceived fall in federal cancer research budgets, insisting that the turmoil of the second Trump administration’s first year is a thing of the past.
Speaking to a crowd of his peers at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) annual meeting in San Diego Monday, Letai claimed that the NCI is “stable,” while its “mission remains unchanged and funding is strong.”
While the institute did award fewer grants in 2025, he acknowledged, the rise of lump-sum payments for multiyear grants—where the NCI and other National Institutes of Health agencies pay out the full amount of a grant at once rather than meting it out year after year—means “we actually provided more dollars to extramural research in fiscal year 2025 than at any time in the history of the National Cancer Institute.”
“There's understandable confusion about charting the course ahead,” Letai said. “We've seen policy shifts, particularly in funding structure, that have raised questions about the effectiveness of the federal research enterprise.”
Letai’s words were meant to soothe a research community that has been hammered not just by confusion and uncertainty, but tangible losses to their work. Terminated NIH grants disrupted hundreds of clinical trials and hit women and early-career researchers the hardest. Research not aligned with the administration’s anti-diversity priorities is actively scrutinized.
And despite Congress giving NIH a slight budget bump for 2026, the agency is still slow to dispense grants and announce new funding opportunities.
Letai does not dispute that last year was a tough one for science. He recognized that the number of R01s—the NIH’s flagship grant program—awarded to early-career researchers was down last year. But he sees a clear path ahead for correction.
“NCI is planning and budgeting this year to make more [early-stage investigator] awards in fiscal year 2026 and return to the levels that we were used to all throughout the 2020s,” he said. And once multiyear funding becomes a stable practice, “you get to fund the same number of grants.”
“It's not an ongoing problem,” the NCI director said, noting that he expects a funding rate of 11% moving forward, a decline from past years.
Letai blamed “misinformation” for amplifying perceptions of how much damage cancer research has faced, including the fact that President Trump’s proposed massive budget cut for NIH in 2026 never came to pass.
“Yes, there was an initial proposal to cut the budget of the NCI by 40% or 37%, but that didn't come to fruition,” Letai said. “What actually happened is we got a budget that was slightly higher.”
For 2027, Trump has once again put forth a plan to slash the NIH budget—this time by around 11%—but without touching the NCI. Letai views this as a sign of the center’s strong bipartisan support.
“The NCI is not meddled with,” he told the audience. In all his conversations with Trump, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and members of Congress, one message comes through loud and clear. “They just want us to cure cancer,” Letai said.
The fight goes on
Letai was named NCI director in September 2025, following a long and illustrious career as a cancer researcher at Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
“I think his message is that he's a huge supporter of cancer research, and he'll do his very, very best to make sure that the funding does flow and that the best science is funded,” Robert Vonderheide, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania and president-elect of AACR, told Fierce at the conference.
Vonderheide himself spent lots of time on Capitol Hill last year, he said, to convince lawmakers of the value of cancer research. During the opening ceremony of this year’s meeting, attendees held up signs thanking Congress for rejecting Trump’s proposed budget cuts, and AACR recognized Maine Senator Susan Collins, a Republican, for her support of medical research funding.
But while disaster was averted last year, AACR is not letting its guard down. The organization has called on Congress to again reject Trump’s proposed NIH cuts for 2027, even though his plan leaves NCI funding alone.
“There's so much cancer research outside of the NCI,” Vonderheide told Fierce. “Forty per cent of NIH dollars that Abramson Cancer Center members hold is not from the NCI, but from other institutes which are also working on cancer.”
Similar to other professional organizations like the American Society of Hematology, AACR has also stepped up to help provide funding to cancer scientists. The group recently announced 15 grants of $1 million each for early- and mid-career researchers, supported by royalties Pfizer donated from sales of its antibody Bavencio.
“At Pfizer, we believe that meaningful progress against cancer begins with investing in scientists and physicians whose ideas have the potential to transform patient care,” Pfizer’s Chief Oncology Officer Jeff Legos, Ph.D., said in an April 19 release. “Through partnership, we can turn discovery into impact, and we’re proud to work with AACR to help accelerate bold, innovative research.”
It may seem surprising that cancer research requires any advocacy at all. A recent survey from AACR, which asked 1,001 registered voters for their opinions on cancer research, found strong support across both political parties—93% of Democrats and 75% of Republicans said they agreed with increasing funding for cancer research.
The events of last year were “a bit of a wake-up that we can't take the country's support for cancer research for granted,” Vonderheide told Fierce. In all of his meetings with politicians fighting to protect funding, he added, one voice stood out above all others.
“The most influential voices in last year's conversations were not cancer center directors or NIH-funded researchers, but the patients,” he said.