US Cancer Institute Director Points to Declining Funding for Research

[Guest guest]

[Terrible news as reported before. Please visit your Senator's and

Congressman's websites and just send in a quick note telling them you

want MORE MONEY for cancer (and specifically CLL) research.

That money will be well spent, as it will save lives and add to the US

economy when new drugs are invented and manufactured.

Please help!]

U.S. National Institutes of Health | www.cancer.gov

NCI Cancer Bulletin: A Trusted Source for Cancer Research News

February 5, 2008 • Volume 5 / Number 3

Director's Update

Budget Proposal Highlights Cancer Research Progress, Priorities

NCI's annual report on the Nation's Investment in Cancer ResearchAmong

the most valuable communication tools created as a result of the

National Cancer Act of 1971 is the NCI's annual report on The Nation's

Investment in Cancer Research, which was released this week. Often

referred to as the " bypass budget, " this report is intended to

directly inform the President and guide the administration's budget

request to Congress for NCI funding.

It was designed by its originators, led by Rep. , to lay

out in detail for the President what is needed to make as rapid

progress as possible to change the course of this disease, and to

provide NCI with the resources required to lead the National Cancer

Program.

The Nation's Investment tells the story of scientific opportunity,

emphasizing critical areas of progress in cancer research and

highlighting key NCI programs that will drive future gains. It also

offers insight into NCI's scientific planning and priorities,

including what is called the " professional judgment budget. "

This budget contains two different proposals: the budget NCI

leadership believes is needed to simply sustain the National Cancer

Program in its current state, and the budget required to launch new

and expand current initiatives that NCI feels can hasten progress.

For fiscal year (FY) 2009, NCI's proposed budget to simply sustain our

current level of activities is approximately $5.2 billion, while the

proposal to accelerate progress is approximately $6 billion. By

comparison, NCI's FY 2007 budget was approximately $4.8 billion.

Any report of this kind being delivered in 2008 cannot escape some

difficult facts, namely that we have been operating under a flat

budget for the last 4 years. And because of the continued brisk pace

of biomedical inflation, the chief result has been a 12 percent

reduction in NCI's purchasing power over that same period.

This lost purchasing power has had serious consequences. They include

extramural laboratories cutting back on postdoctoral fellows, fewer

resources with which to conduct needed clinical trials and fewer

patients in already funded trials, and scaling back important programs

and foregoing the launch of new programs, to cite just a few examples.

And one particularly concerning repercussion of such problems is the

serious impact on promising young investigators, many of whom have

been choosing alternate career paths.

While progress will continue in all important areas of cancer

research, it is clear that the pace of our progress is closely aligned

with our available resources and, therefore, will be significantly slowed.

The Nation's Investment in Cancer Research illustrates how NCI is

using its resources to support the best science and ensure continued

advances, with an acute focus on how we are establishing the necessary

infrastructure and programs to more closely connect important

components of the cancer and larger biomedical research communities.

These areas include critical initiatives like the Glioma Molecular

Diagnostics Initiative, a collaborative effort spearheaded by NCI's

Dr. Fine. The GMDI is bringing together NCI cancer centers and

cooperative groups, the pharmaceutical industry, brain tumor

consortia, and other NIH institutes to develop more individualized

therapies for gliomas, particularly glioblastomas, a highly aggressive

and often fatal type of brain cancer.

We are creating new connections through the National Community Cancer

Centers Program, which will bring clinical trials closer to patients

in their communities and allow us to conduct important research on

quality of and disparities in care.

We are recruiting researchers from different disciplines to jointly

tackle the most urgent problems in collaborative research networks.

For example, the Tumor Microenvironment Network is enlisting cancer

biologists, pathologists, and bioinformatics specialists, among

others, to delve further into what we now understand is the critical

role a tumor's immediate environment plays in its development and

metastatic potential.

Through the Chemoprevention Research Consortium, we are translating

promising lab results of new chemoprevention agents into phase I and

II human clinical trials, setting the stage for the phase III trials

that can determine the most effective and safest chemoprevention drugs

for patients at increased cancer risk.

We are connecting the past and future through NCI's rapidly evolving

training programs to help produce the next generation of cancer

researchers, and via NCI's Spanish-language Web site, we are reaching

out to native Spanish speakers with vital information on cancer and

cancer research.

Information on all of this and much more is in this year's report, and

I encourage the cancer community to take advantage of it and other NCI

communications tools, both for your own information and to inform your

own research or outreach efforts.

Dr. E. Niederhuber

Director, National Cancer Institute