Published Mar 12, 2019

Major Cancer Group Calls on Congress to Protect Funding for Research After Trump’s Proposed 2020 Budget

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At the precise moment when research into new cancer treatment is accelerating at the fastest pace in history, a battle is unfolding over the money to pay for it. If President Trump’s proposed 2020 fiscal year budget is approved, funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will be slashed by $4.7 billion. The American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) is calling on Congress to reject the budget.

Under the President’s proposal, which was released Monday, the NIH’s budget would go from its current $39.1 billion to $34.4 billion — a 12% cut. The proposal would also cut the National Cancer Institute (NCI)’s budget by $897 million — a 15% cut from the current funding level of $6.1 billion. At a time when cancer research is so crucial, these proposed cuts have a lot of researchers worried.

In a statement responding to the proposed budget, AACR President Elizabeth M. Jaffee, MD, brought attention to the fact that these cuts are a reversal of the funding models over the last few years. “Congress has prioritized medical research because of the extraordinary number of scientific opportunities that now exist to save the lives of cancer patients and improve the quality of their lives,” she wrote. “Clearly, this is not the time to be cutting the lifesaving research that the NIH and the National Cancer Institute so effectively support.”

Among these recent extraordinary scientific discoveries is immunotherapy — or harvesting the body’s own immune system to fight cancer. Dr. Steven Rosenberg, Chief of Surgery at the National Cancer Institute, said immunotherapy has been something of a revolution when it comes to cancer treatment. “Now, in the last several years, there’s been an explosion of information that enables us to help larger numbers of patients by getting their body’s own immune system to fight this disease,” Dr. Rosenberg told SurvivorNet when discussing immunotherapy in general. “There have been some startling advances, even in the last few years, that have been the result of the genomic revolution.”

In order for the advances to continue, the organizations that do the research need to be funded. Margaret Foti, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of AACR, said that the proposed budget would “seriously jeopardize” the progress researchers have made in just the past few years when it comes to prevention and treatment of cancer.

Among the cuts, however, was a $50 million increase in pediatric cancer research funding over the next fiscal year. The budget said that the allotment for childhood cancer research is the first step in investing $500 million in the cause over the next decade, which President Trump called for during his State of the Union address earlier this year. However, experts have suggested that cutting the budget for cancer research overall will hurt both children and adults — even with the budgeted funds for pediatric cancer.

“Childhood cancer research is intertwined with all of cancer research,” Lisa Lacasse, President of the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, told SFGate. “Cuts to NIH and NCI funding will consequently have deleterious effects on such research regardless of age.”

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