President Bush Cuts Funding For Cancer Research

President George W. Bush lauded the role of medical research as he announced a breakthrough in January: U.S. cancer deaths fell in 2004 for the second-straight year, the first back-to-back decline on record.

Three weeks later, Bush asked Congress to trim $11 million from the National Cancer Institute budget, on top of $32 million in cuts over the previous two years.

After growing 80 percent from 1998 to 2003, the NCI budget is in decline, and trials on cancer drugs and therapies conducted by hospital networks are feeling the pinch. Officials at NCI, which funds half of all patient trials in the U.S., have told the networks they should trim operations, in some cases by 10 percent, say specialists who run the tests.

"There is no question that the impact of flat and declining budgets will be real and can be measured in terms of human life,'' says Allen Lichter, chief executive officer of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, a physician group. "Some trials will not start. Existing trials will take longer to complete. These are devastating effects.''

Bush said in his budget message to Congress that the cuts he's proposed for NCI and some other agencies are part of a plan to balance the federal budget within five years from a current deficit of $244 billion.

The president's proposal would earmark $4.78 billion for the cancer institute in the 2008 fiscal year. The $11 million trim represents a decline of less than 1 percent. Michael Miller, an NCI spokesman, confirmed that the hospital networks, called cooperatives, are being asked to plan for percentage reductions that exceed the overall budget cut.

"We suggested they plan for up to 10 percent cuts,'' Miller says, adding that the agency didn't specify that trials specifically had to be reduced.
The cancer institute will use a portion of its budget to help fund a "roadmap'' to chart the direction for U.S. medical research in the 21st century, Miller says.
The latest cuts may be overturned by Congress, which is holding hearings today on biomedical research funding. Doctors and researchers from leading universities, including Harvard and Yale, urged lawmakers at a Senate hearing in Washington to increase the budget for the National Institutes of Health.

"Four years of flat funding have had a devastating impact on the trajectory of cancer research,'' Joan Brugge, head of the department of cell biology at Harvard Medical School, told the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. "We are now damaging the research infrastructure, and this will certainly delay relief from the cancer burden.''

The accumulated reductions since 2005 already are having an impact, researchers say.