During his last State of the Union address, President Obama uttered a statement that elicited rare cheers from lawmakers in both parties.
“For the loved ones we’ve all lost, for the family we can still save, let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all,” the president said Tuesday.
Obama said he would appoint Vice President Joe Biden, who lost his son Beau to cancer in May, as head of “mission control.”
Cancer advocates cheered the goal of a “moon shot” to a cure, and said the best path is consistent funding for the National Institutes of Health. They also stressed that the complexity of the disease could lead to a long wait.
NIH received an extra $2 billion in its budget for fiscal 2016 thanks partly to lobbying from Biden.
The 21st Century Cures Act, which passed the House last year, would give the agency $10 billion in mandatory spending over five years. Now the Senate appears to be crafting its own legislation, but hasn’t announced any funding figures for the agency.
But advocates say one-time boosts aren’t enough for an agency that doles out 83 percent of its funds as research grants.
“If NIH wins the lottery, it would be much better off not taking the lump sum and instead taking the payments for 30 years,” said John Retzlaff, managing director for science policy and government affairs for the American Association of Cancer Research.
NIH has been on a financial roller coaster for the past two decades.
From 1994 to 1998, the agency’s funding grew from about $11 billion to $13 billion, according to a 2013 Congressional Research Service report.
Over the next five years, the agency’s budget almost doubled to $27 billion in 2003. But that is when the downturn happened.
“Beginning in 2004 and all the way through 2015 the NIH [budget] declined by 25 percent when you account for inflation,” Retzlaff said.
Sequestration also required the agency to cut about $1.55 billion, or 5 percent, of its 2013 budget.
The lack of funds had a dire effect on the state of medical research, with the success rate on getting an NIH grant being about 14 to 17 percent, he added.
“We have had so many wonderful scientific proposals being on the cutting-room floor,” Retzlaff said.
It also will take voters to embolden the political will for lawmakers to keep sustained funding for the NIH, which Retzlaff suggests should be a 7 percent boost each year.
“Members of Congress and candidates running for national office can and I believe will, if voters insist, help us turn this moment for medical research into a significant, sustained movement,” said Mary Woolley, president and CEO of Research America.
But lawmakers need to do more than just open their pocketbooks, Woolley said.
“Our elected officials must support measures that encourage stakeholders to break down silos and use their collective brainpower to end cancer,” she said.
Biden wrote in a post on the website Medium Tuesday that he hopes to bring all “the cancer fighters together — to work together, share information and end cancer as we know it.”
The vice president’s staff recently met with cancer researchers and experts to figure out what he could do in his remaining year in office.
Over the next year, Biden wrote he plans to combine industry, physician, patient and philanthropic efforts on fighting cancer.
“The federal government will do everything it possibly can — through funding, targeted incentives and increased private-sector coordination — to support research and enable progress,” Biden wrote.
Biden added he plans to meet next week with experts at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland to discuss the current state of cancer research and treatment. This month he plans to lead the first of several meetings of Cabinet members to look for improvements in federal investments in research and treatment.
Biden also has said that he plans to stay engaged and be a leader in the fight, and he will be needed, Retzlaff said.
That is because cancer is “one of the most complex diseases that mankind has ever known. It is constantly evolving and complicated in so many ways.”
Scientists have made major progress on fighting cancer, but there is a ways to go.
“It is going to be a problem that we will be fighting for decades,” he said. “During those decades we will have major progress but it is a huge, huge challenge when you talk about over 200 cancers and the way cancer can evolve and change and almost outsmart some of the drugs we come up [with].”
