Proposed NIH budget cuts could have disastrous impact on progress in cancer research

Our nation has many competing needs for federal funding, but few have the impact of cancer; half of men and a third of women will get cancer in their lifetime. Those are staggering statistics, and they mean all of us will either struggle against the disease or watch someone close to us lose their battle against it. 

And yet, led by the United States, cancer research has brought hope to what was once a death sentence – and for a growing number of patients, a cure. Cell by cell, we’re better understanding how cancer forms, how it changes and how it can be stopped. 

{mosads}At The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute, I treat many patients at the advanced stages of lung cancer, and I have seen powerful results emerge from a new generation of therapies. Many of my patients are living at least twice as long as individuals I diagnosed just a few years ago. And across oncology, new discoveries are affecting patients every day.

We are so close to winning, why would we walk away from this fight?

It’s a question we should all ask now that the White House has released a 2018 Blueprint for our government’s next budget. While vague in its content, the document reveals that the federal agency most responsible for America’s cancer fight, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is slated for a reduction of $5.8 billion from current levels.

Beyond the financial hit, the budget mentions “a major reorganization of NIH’s Institutes and Centers” to include eliminating a center, consolidations and “structural changes across NIH organizations and activities.” The entire agency faces disruption.

Disrupting NIH means more than the potential loss of research, it means unnecessary distraction for the legions of individuals running thousands of ongoing clinical trials, programs that patients at the most critical stages of disease are relying upon for any hope of beating their illness. Meaningful, peer-reviewed studies would likely be halted and the best new ideas not funded.

Cancer research is not something you just slow down then expect it to pick up the same pace sometime in the future when funds become available. It also means that we in the United States will depend more on cancer research investments in nations overseas that have a less robust research infrastructure but are now poised to make discoveries faster.

Yet another loss relates to technology and revenue that begins with discoveries made in the United States. And ultimately, it means American patients may soon suffer from a decline in the extraordinary number of exciting breakthroughs in medicine, a threat we have not faced in our lifetimes.

The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) has spent more than a century fighting cancer, and they were early to issue a statement against the NIH cuts. From their vantage, the loss is not just to research but to “the careers of an entire generation of young investigators working in labs and clinics all over the country who are committed to improving public health and saving lives.”

If our nation remains on its current path, the world’s best doctors will stop coming to the United States to help us defeat cancer, and physicians already here may choose to leave. 

Even without budget cuts, remarkably brilliant research ideas have not been funded, especially when considering that the budgets for NIH and its largest component institute, the National Cancer Institute, have not kept pace with inflation, resulting in the NIH losing approximately 25 percent of its ability to fund lifesaving research between FY2004 and FY2015.

Researchers and other experts vet grant proposals to decide which may have the greatest impact, and yet there are just too many even for current funding levels. Cutting further, at any level, is bad — but to cut nearly $6 billion from NIH now will be disastrous.

If such a mistake is made, it cannot be quickly reversed. Studies take years, and many of the programs that support them can take a decade or more to ramp up to their full impact. It is time that will be lost, progress that will halt, all while cancers continue to grow and kill people.

The proposed budget is out and we all must watch its progress closely. Congress last year, in a bipartisan fashion, raised NIH funding because of its importance. Everyone understands how much cancer affects us. Our nation did not reach its level of achievement and leadership in a single year, but there is potential that it may take just that long for us to lose it. 

Dr. Peter Shields is deputy director of The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center and a medical oncologist at the Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute with a focus on prevention and treatment of lung and breast cancer. His research studies the causes of cancer and develops biomarkers of cancer risk in order to improve prevention methods and early detection.

The views of contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.