Proposal would cut cancer institute budget again
By Liz Szabo, USA TODAY 1/29/2007
Leading cancer experts say key research could come to a halt because of proposed spending cuts to the National Cancer Institute.
President Bush has proposed cutting the institute's budget for the second consecutive year. The cuts would reduce the NCI's 2007 budget by almost 1%, or $36 million, to just over $4.7 billion. Although NCI director John Niederhuber notes that the institute's final budget has not been set, he's concerned that Congress could shrink his budget by 5% to 10%.
During a visit recently to the National Institutes of Health, Bush said NCI funding is still relatively high and has doubled in the past decade. Bush also noted an American Cancer Society report showing that the number of cancer deaths dropped for the second year in a row, falling by 3,014 from 2003 to 2004.
"We're proud of the significant investment that we have made in cancer research," White House spokesman Tony Fratto says. "We're also proud of the results showing that researchers are delivering on that investment."
But scientists are concerned that funding cuts could undermine that success. "At a time when we are finally making progress, they are pulling the rug out," says Allen Lichter, executive vice president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
The oncology society says cooperative cancer groups around the country may have to close or delay 95 trials this year, nearly half of the trials that these groups conduct each year.
Up to 3,000 patients could miss out on the opportunity of joining a trial, says the University of Chicago's Richard Schilsky, chairman of the Cancer and Leukemia Group B.
The Southwest Oncology Group, which runs clinical trials, already has eliminated two of the 10 cancers it once studied, says Larry Baker, the group's chairman and a professor at the University of Michigan Medical School. Baker's group will no longer study head and neck cancers or sarcomas, tumors that arise from connective tissues.
Another research group has opted to stop studying brain tumors, Schilsky says. That's a huge loss to patients with those types of cancer, he says, even if medical colleges and other groups still fund research in those tumors.
"There is a real cost in human life," Lichter says.
Rural patients may suffer the most, Schilsky says, as research groups drop smaller community hospitals.
These research groups have led many key cancer trials, Lichter says. Their studies showed that the drugs tamoxifen and raloxifene may prevent breast cancer, for example. Researchers had hoped to begin the next phase of study, evaluating whether a class of drugs called aromatase inhibitors also prevent breast cancer, he says.
"The study is approved, ready to go and it's absolutely, positively on hold."
