Cancer research funding plummets

Despite pioneering work at Yale, federal subsidies for Connecticut down 19 percent

Connecticut’s share of funding from the National Cancer Institute has dropped 19 percent since 2010 — a steeper decline than many other states, an analysis of National Institutes of Health data show.

Federal cancer institute funding to Connecticut fell to $33.4 million in 2014 — down from $41.1 million in 2010. The biggest grantee, Yale University, is receiving $7 million less from the National Cancer Institute, one of the NIH’s most prominent centers.

Overall, NIH research grants to Connecticut fell to $461.3 million — down from $484.4 million in 2010, NIH reports show. Most of that decline was in research awards to Yale, which dropped $25 million.

Yale cancer researchers say the funding cuts come at a time of potential breakthroughs in new screening and treatment options, some based on progress in genetics. Nationally, funding for breast cancer research fell 20 percent between 2010 and 2013; funding for cervical cancer and lung cancer research fell to their lowest levels in four years in 2013.

“It’s particularly tragic that right at the time when we are on the cusp of major advances in genomics, immunotherapies, and personalized medicine, there is a significant decline in NIH funding,” said Dr. Anees Chagpar, director of The Breast Center-- Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven.

“We continue to strive to do the kind of impactful research that will result in more people living cancer-free — or perhaps never getting cancer in the first place, but the lack of funding for such work just means it takes that much longer to reach the holy grail.”

This summer, leaders of the

FROMPAGE 1 American Society of Clinical Oncology sounded the alarm over the decline in cancer research funding, saying that the number of federally funded studies submitted to the group’s annualmeeting had fallen sharply over seven years— from 575 studies in 2008, to just 169 this year. The NCI saw its total funding drop below $5 billion for the first time since 2009— to $4.8 billion in 2013 and $4.9 billion in 2014.

“While our country has had a long-standing commitment to funding cancer research, this commitment appears to be diminishing,” said the society’s outgoing president, Dr. Clifford Hudis, chief of the Breast Cancer Medicine Service at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

While a number of states have seen declines in cancer research funding, many, such as New York, Florida and California, have seen smaller declines than Connecticut. Overall, NCI funding has dropped about 3.5 percent since 2010.

The decline in total NIH funding has impacted not only cancer researchers, but also scientists chasing other illnesses. At Yale, researcher Amy Arnsten, a professor of neurobiology and psychology who is exploring causes of Alzheimer’s disease, said that about 90 percent of her grant requests have been rejected in the past several years.

“I had a Program Project grant that had funding for many labs to work together to try to figure out whatmakes the aging brain so vulnerable,” she said. Because of the funding reductions and pressure on the NIH to maintain a large number of smaller grants for individual labs, “there was very little funding left in the pot for Program-Projects,” which are multi-site collaborations.

“It makes it much harder to work together with researchers who have different skills but are interested in the same ideas — which is the approach you need to solve big problems like Alzheimer’s,” she said.

Nationally, the NIH budget peaked in fiscal year 2010 at $31.2 billion, falling to $30 billion in fiscal year 2014. Budget sequestration in 2013 cut the agency’s spending by 5 percent.

This past week, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3, and other Democratic members of the House of Representatives’ Labor, Health and Human Services, Education Appropriations Subcommittee renewed their call for a hearing on budget cuts to the NIH and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in light of the ongoing public health threat posed by the Ebola virus. They said the NIH had lost more than 10 percent of its purchasing power since 2010, when accounting for inflation.

Like other universities, Yale has taken on corporate partners in recent years to try to close the funding gap. In 2011, the Yale School of Medicine formed a multiyear research partnership with Gilead Sciences, through which the biopharmaceutical company is providing Yale with $40 million for research on novel cancer therapies.

In 2012, Yale announced a partnership with GlaxoSmithKline to design a new class of molecules that will target diseasecausing proteins. And last year, the AbbVie pharmaceutical company and Yale began a $14.5 million collaboration on research into the causes of autoimmune and inflammatory diseases.

Non-academic research also has been impacted by NIH reductions. The state Department of Public Health received more than $2 million a year from the NCI from 2010 through 2012 for a Connecticut Tumor Registry, a population-based resource for examining cancer patterns in Connecticut.