Not all of us are aware of the amounts of money that the U.S. government spends on cancer research. I did a little Googling and came up with some numbers that some people will find surprising.
One big dispensary of government funding is the Department of Defense (DoD) Prostate Cancer Research Program (PCRP). I know about that because I participated in it as a "consumer reviewer", i.e., a prostate cancer patient who gets to read research proposals and put in comments and evaluation from a non-scientist, non-doctor point of view. For 2019, PCRP has a budget of $100 million for prostate cancer research and has spent $1.72 billion over the years since 1997. This is money that is allocated as grants, almost all to universities and research institutes, for prostate cancer research. Often it is funding part of a research project that also has other funds. The prostate cancer research program is one part of the DoD health research work that extends to many other cancers and other diseases.
The National Cancer Institute has a significantly larger program. I downloaded a spreadsheet from their website listing all of their projects for Fiscal Year 2017. It showed the following:
Prostate cancer research: 876 projects $233+ million.
Total cancer research (all cancers): 8477 projects, $5.636+ billion dollars.
Many of us worry that the big pharmaceutical companies aren't funding potentially important research because it won't make money for them. I worry about that too. It's a problem that needs to be addressed. My own view is that capitalism offers some real incentives to solve important problems and that big pharma has a valuable role to play, but I think we need more regulation to reduce incentives for research on "me too" drugs (e.g., yet another leuprolide) and increase incentives for truly new solutions - but that's a different topic with lots of issues to consider.
However, even without much help from big pharma, we are getting lots of research done via government support. Fortunately, both Republicans and Democrats get all the same diseases and medical research is popular with, and supported by, people in both parties.
Alan
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AlanMeyer
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When I participated in the SBRT Phase II clinical trial at UT Southwestern in 2007, the principal investigator, Dr. Robert Timmerman was funded by this DoD money.His study indicated that for G6 or less, hypofractionated SBRT is just as effective as the then standard IMRT, BCR wise.
That's a good example. Presumably pharmaceutical companies made no money from this research but it was done and published anyway and, presumably, is helping to influence radiation oncologists.
>>> Fortunately, both Republicans and Democrats get all the same diseases and medical research is popular with, and supported by, people in both parties.<<<
trump’s 2020 Budget Plan Slashes National Cancer Institute
The NCI would take the biggest hit—$897 million—falling from $6.1 to $5.2 billion.
I try not to present any political views or opinions about our dear President on this forum, but this news doesn't make it any easier.
I worked in one way or another as a contractor at NIH for about 38 years, including 26 years at NCI. I have a very high regard for those institutions and for the intelligent and dedicated people who work for them.
I completely understand. My reply was not intended as a criticism of your statement of fact. I was only trying to say that I was strongly tempted to make a political statement about the facts of the case but I was holding myself back so as not to offend anyone.
I have no doubt of the governments funding from whatever agency. What I do object to is the "big pharma" taking the findings and marketing the drugs for obscene prices.
I agree that that is a problem. If I correctly understand the way the laws are written, the pharmaceutical companies can actually get patent rights to government funded research, make millions from it, and not pay anything back to the government in the way of royalties.
I don't want to make this out to be an easy problem to fix. Politically it's very difficult because of the huge amounts of money spent on lobbying and campaign finance. But even if those problems can be solved, there is the problem of how best to both incentivize the private sector to do medical research and development, and at the same time align their interests with the needs of patients. We don't want to do the latter at the cost of shutting down the drug companies. But we don't want to do the former at the cost of spending huge amounts on duplicate research - do we need four different Lupron variants, three different Viagra variants, and dozens of high blood pressure medicines that all do the same thing? We also don't want to ignore low volume but dangerous diseases or push prices up to the sky.
Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, wrote the book The Truth About the Drug Companies in 2004 that has what struck me as excellent suggestions, but of course they have never been implemented.
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