What better day than today to give a quick update on the National Cancer Institute (NCI) budget?
The year is 1999 and scientists are abuzz with the publication of the first full genome sequencing results of a tiny worm (Caenorhabditis elegans). Breast cancer researchers are gaining momentum with antibody therapy (Herceptin) and curing women that were previously dying and I graduated high school (ah…you are paying attention!) Anyway, it was a good time to be a researcher, especially a cancer researcher. My mentors will say it was the heyday of science for them. The money was there, the technology was exploding and they were making great strides. But then in 2003, everything came to a screeching halt and essentially the money dried up. Things even got worse with the 2011 Budget Control Act and belts were further tightened.
It has now been fifteen years and the NCI has lost nearly 25% of its budget due to inflation. The purchasing power of federal money that is available today for cancer research in 2018 is LESS THAN what we were working with in 1999!
The purple bars in the picture are inflation adjusted dollars. You’ll see some hatched lines starting in 2017, those lines are additional money put into the NCI for the Cancer Moonshot Initiative which was signed into law in December 2016 with the 21st Century Cures Act and authorized an additional 1.8 billion dollars over a 7 year period. Despite this program (which does have pediatric fusion oncogenes as a priority area!) we still are facing an uphill battle.
For 2018, the total NCI budget is 5.389 billion dollars (I won’t comment on what happened between the ’17 and ’18 budgets). Of that 5.389 billion, 2.17 billion is slotted for research programs and grants. The research is roughly divided into three main categories 1) basic research 2) clinical science (develop and test drugs, imaging, diagnostics etc.) and 3) population sciences (epidemiologic, behavioral, and environmental studies). You can imagine as you drill down deeper into the piece of the 2.17 billion dollar pie, money gets tight. Science is expensive, medicine is expensive and 2.17 billion dollars can go fast. The last breakdown of the budget that I could find by category was from 2015, when childhood cancer received 205 million dollars in funding which is 3.8% of this year’s NCI budget.
So, 205 million dollars for childhood cancer research from the federal government each year seems like a lot right? However, you have to keep in mind is that every single childhood cancer is lumped together for that funding; in contrast, breast cancer alone receives over 500 million each year.
“More than 3.8” sounds funny so let’s keep with #morethanfour, because our children deserve more than four percent.
NCI Budget Information: Click here
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