Stand Up To Cancer

On Wednesday, President Obama announced $5 billion in new funding for the National Institutes of Health, as part of nationwide stimulus efforts. The money will be used "to conduct cutting-edge research all across America, to unlock treatments to diseases that have long plagued humanity, to save and enrich the lives of people all over the world. This represents the single largest boost to biomedical research in history."

A great commitment that got even better as the President spoke about the top priority among these diseases: "In cancer, we're beginning to see treatments based on our knowledge of genetic changes that cause the disease and the genetic predispositions that many of us carry that make us more susceptible to the disease." Considering the flat funding for the NIH and NCI over the past decade, these new resources and their concentration on cancer are encouraging news, and we are grateful.

To be precise, it's an amazing start. The funds going to cancer research in this round will concentrate on mapping the Cancer Genome. It's a worthy endeavor that may yield game-changing breakthroughs in our understanding of the disease. Going forward, the NIH will have the opportunity to balance the effort to end cancer by moving beyond basic research. Thus far, the speed of our discovery has outpaced our will to apply it.

President Obama, with a new NIH Director in Dr. Francis Collins and a mandate for renewed leadership in science, has a chance to change the way cancer is researched and treated in this country. Those of us affected by cancer know that money devoted to research must do more than create new jobs and new knowledge to be a successful investment. Ultimately, it has to save lives. That means translational research.

With translational research, government can leverage the gains of basic research like the Cancer Genome Project to pursue much needed therapies and cures. While basic research offers a certain safety, a risk-averse approach will not fulfill the mission of the NIH. President Obama, speaking at the campus Franklin Roosevelt dedicated to the newly formed NIH in 1940, three years after the founding of the National Cancer Institute, acknowledged this truth.

"Progress takes time," he said. "It takes hard work; it can be unpredictable; it can require a willingness to take risks and going down some blind alleys occasionally -- figuring out what doesn't work is sometimes as important as figuring out what does -- all of this needs the support of government."

That's why we're hoping that President Obama and Dr. Collins will commit to supporting research that will accelerate discoveries made in the lab to treatments that will directly benefit patients. It's time to put our limitless capacity for discovery to work for the people the NIH is trying to help. In the meantime, we can all be part of the solution in moving science forward.

You can listen to the AACR's teleconference on the $5 billion in new grants here.