President Trump’s budget proposal for the 2018 fiscal year has sent shockwaves through the healthcare and scientific communities: Trump proposed to cut the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by 18 percent or $5.8 billion.
Fortunately, that budget has to go through Congress, who has made one point abundantly clear: biomedical research matters. In April, when Congress announced its bipartisan budget deal to fund the government for the next five months, it directly repudiated the Administration, boosting NIH funding by $2 billion.
Still, the Administration’s signals are worrisome. As former Vice President Biden said about the Trump proposal, “this would set the NIH budget and biomedical research back 15 years – and that’s not hyperbole.”
Investing $30 billion a year, NIH is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, supporting 300,000 researchers at more than 2,500 universities and organizations. Over the years, NIH funding has had a significant impact on our lives from the vaccine that has nearly eliminated childhood meningitis to identifying the risk factors of heart disease and leading the fight against HIV/AIDS. NIH’s investments also have a significant multiplier effect, stimulating the economy and creating jobs: just look at the NIH-led project that sequenced the human genome – not only was it a medical breakthrough, but it generated an economic impact of $796 billion, a 141:1 return on investment for the U.S. government.
And, since Trump initially proposed the cuts in March, they’ve already had a real impact on biomedical innovation, holding back cancer research. Before any cut has even been debated in Congress, the damage is already being done.
Take, for example, the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) SEER program which, for the past four decades, has collected information about cancer incidence and survival across the country. This database is the foundation of information upon which researchers, doctors, and public health officials build new ways to battle this disease. They use it evaluate cancer prevention efforts and the quality of care, to document disparities in care and survival, and to assess what works and what does not against cancer.
Over the past 15 years, there has been a real need to update the SEER database as there has been a revolution in our understanding of cancer. Now, we can look at tumors at the molecular and genomic levels to understand exactly what kind of cancer one may have, and then personalize a treatment. This personalized – or precision – oncology has helped accelerate dramatic reductions in the death rates of those with types of cancer including those found in the prostate, breast, and lungs. Introducing molecular data into the SEER database will further our understanding of the prevalence and epidemiology of tumor mutations. Since the proposed budget cuts were announced, this pursuit has stalled.
And they were not the only ones affected.
A University of Pittsburgh professor told CNBC that a group of qualified grant applications to update biomedical data sets also were rejected because of concerns of coming budget cuts.
It may make sense for an agency not to award contracts or grants for which it may not have funding come the fall. But it makes no sense for our country to pull back on investment in biomedical research, and especially cancer research. The combination of advances in basic science and in technology to make these discoveries actionable has revolutionized cancer care. Precision oncology is at a critical inflection point: it’s gaining wide popularity with hospital systems and their oncologists are rushing to make it part of routine cancer care. Now is when we need to be doubling down on precision medicine, accelerating its spread to as many practitioners and patients as we can. Part of doing that includes providing the infrastructure – like registries – that will enable thousands of doctors and researchers to bring these cures to the bedside.
To be fair, the Trump budget proposal would fully fund the 21st Century Cures Act, the bipartisan bill passed last year to put into action parts of Biden’s “cancer moonshot” initiative that he started after the death of his son, Beau, in 2015, from cancer. Yet, this represents a fraction of overall federal cancer funding; consider that the 21st Century Cures Act calls for $1.8 billion a year, while the anticipated cut to NCI alone could be $1 billion.
What we have seen now with research projects being stalled is just a preview of what deep cuts to biomedical research will bring. It will set back the progress we have made against diseases like cancer, and slow the adoption of precision medicine, the biggest innovation in cancer care in a generation. Companies like mine will weather that storm, but there are thousands of cancer patients who will not – and that is a tragedy that will affect us all.
When Investment Rhymes with Canada
Canada has a proud history of achievement in the areas of science and technology, and the field of biomanufacturing and life sciences is no exception.
