For more than 50 years, the National Institutes of Health & the National Cancer Institute have been sparking major advances in cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. Sadly, those days are coming to an end.
From early chemotherapy trials to new immunotherapies and CAR T-cell treatments, public funding has driven the basic science and clinical research that private industry uses to develop new cancer therapies, prevention strategies and tools.
Without NIH and NCI, many if not most, of the lifesaving cancer therapies we rely on today wouldn’t exist.
NIH and NCI-funded research has led to thousands of patents, laying the scientific groundwork for the private sector to develop therapies with market potential. Achievements like monoclonal antibody therapies, targeted treatments for leukemia, and CAR T-cell therapy for refractory cancers all began in federally funded labs.
Three Ways to Reduce the Burden of Cancer and Why NIH & NCI Funding Matters – AZ Public Health Association
The ROI from NIH and especially NCI funding is huge (6x). For every $100M invested by NIH and their NCI, an estimated $598M in downstream product development is generated.
Private industry and equity plays an important role in therapy development too (especially in late-stage development and commercialization) BUT their focus is mostly on ‘top of the pyramid’ projects with clear market potential… not the core research that provides the foundation for those new therapies.
Without publicly funded early-stage research investment, the pipeline for future breakthroughs will atrophy. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the path the U.S. has been on for the last 6 months.
Kennedy has already slashed NIH & NCI research by an astonishing 35%, and he’s just getting started with his cuts. He has executed mass cancellations of numerous contracts & ended hundreds of research projects (over 800) and layed off ~2,500 NIH researchers.
Note: The canceled NCI research grants were arbitrary and capricious. He didn’t look at the merits of the research or its potential when he the canceled the grants… he simply used ‘keyword-based filtering’ to find words like ‘disparity’, ‘equity’, ‘gender’, and ‘mRNA’ & summarily canceled the research because a key word was used (without any scientific peer review).
His cuts are doing both short-term damage to cancer research and long-term.
By disrupting and ending the careers of young investigators and ending early-stage research programs, his cuts will kill the careers of the next generation of cancer scientists.
Even if (when) a future, more thoughtful administration and congress restores some of the funding, the loss of research talent, abandoned trials, and broken partnerships will impair progress for decades.
Given Kennedy’s aversion to research, it’ll likely take a profound change in the makeup of Congress before we can reverse the tide… unless there’s success in the courts to stem the tide of bad decisions.
Colorado et al. v. DHHS, RFK Jr.
Arizona Attorney General’s Federal Action Lawsuits
If we’re unable to turn the decision-making tables in the 2026 mid-term election the damage will be profound and probably irreversible. In the meantime, our only backstop are the legal actions being filed in federal courts to stop some of these dangerous actions by Kennedy.
Additional Note:
In federal fiscal year 2025 Congress appropriated $7.22 billion to the National Cancer Institute, the same level as FY 2024.
Secretary Kennedy effectively cut a large portion of that cancer research funding with a freeze on NIH grant-making, delaying NCI awards to the tune of $1.5B. He ended over 240 NIH cancer-related grants, affecting approximately $355 million of NCI‑related research funds. He canceled more than $180M in NCI-specific grants during the first three months of 2025 alone.
Combined, these executive actions resulted in an NCI loss of about $2B (so far) in the current fiscal year.
Kennedy is now proposing a formal cut for next fiscal year to reduce the NCI budget from $7.2B to $4.5B (a 37% cut).
