Federal Funding Cuts Hit Cancer Research
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Leslie McClurg in today for Mina Kim. Coming up on Forum, across the country, cancer patients are hearing the unthinkable. Their clinical trials canceled, their doctors out of funding, their hope on hold.

We dive into the fallout from sweeping federal cuts to cancer research. Why are crucial funds for life-saving research suddenly disappearing? And what does it mean for the future of medicine? That's next after this news.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Leslie McClurg. I'm in today for Mina Kim. I'm guessing most of you who are listening know somebody who has cancer. I just lost my cousin to brain cancer over Christmas, and when that diagnosis came in, it really changed everything for our family. And we all pinned our hopes to his clinical trial. And I think that's true for many families.

Federal cuts are now jeopardizing those hopes because clinical trials are now being canceled. Labs are losing funding, and that ripple is rippling down to patients in real time. We're joined by Angus Chen. He's a reporter for Stat News who covers the science and politics of cancer. Welcome, Angus.

Hey, Leslie, thanks for having me. Yeah. So how much funding are we talking about? What is being cut for medical research in total? And how much is being cut for cancer research specifically?

Yeah, I think an exact figure is hard to get when we're looking across the federal government. But recently there was a big program at the Defense Department that was cut that funded a lot of cancer research. And in that cut, almost $200 million for cancer research was taken out for fiscal year 2025.

It's a huge cut, a huge blow to a lot of areas of cancer research that are often described as high risk, high reward, which is what this program kind of focused on funding a lot of time in parallel with sort of what the NIH is doing or has been doing.

And then if you go over to the NIH, we see, you know, I think this is where it's harder to get a sure figure on. But we do see, you know, grants being terminated. We see, you know, funds for training new investigators sort of being taken away or being canceled or sort of just like quietly removed in some cases.

And that has a real impact on research as well, taking away vital resources and really vital sort of training opportunities for the next generation of scientists that will be doing this kind of work. And are these cuts for the NIH or the National Institutes of Health, are these coming down from Trump, from Congress, from both?

Yeah. So for the NIH, this is under the federal government and that is from the direction of the Trump administration. You know, if we we can also look at the proposed indirect cut rate, sort of indirect rate cut, sorry, that was put into place for, you know, a number of hours before a federal court ordered it stopped.

And that was also coming from the Trump administration. And that would have taken just, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars away from research funding across the country. You know, that's still a little bit in limbo as it's being challenged in the courts right now. Why don't we define that for folks? What do you mean when you say indirect rate cuts?

Yeah, absolutely. So these are costs that are added on to every scientific grant that goes out from the federal government to like a university or a medical research institution, something like that. The easiest way to explain it is these are also called facilities and administration costs. And they're described as covering things like the basic infrastructure of doing research. So electricity bills, that would be indirect costs.

You know, certain shared lab supplies, also indirect costs, you know, lab space that, you know, you need rent on or has sort of building depreciation or you need to build something for shared lab space. That all comes out of indirect rate, the indirect rate, these indirect dollars.

And, you know, if you back out and say indirect cut of indirect dollars is everything you need to run a lab that you're not directly accounting for in a grant. They are real costs. Sometimes people think that they're sort of just administrative bloat. By and large, that's not really true. And they're needed dollars to conduct the level of research that the country has been doing for decades.

And universities and hospitals and other places that do research, they rely on these dollars in order to operate. So I would say all of that is coming from the Trump administration. The Defense Department program that I just mentioned earlier, that was a cut that came from Congress. It was sort of passed in the continuing resolution.

But it was also, you know, under pressure, I think, from President Trump as Congress. So the Republican led Congress is under pressure to try to find ways to pay for the tax cuts that President Trump wants to implement. Let's take a step back. How did we get here? I mean, why is the Trump administration targeting medical and scientific research to pay for our tax cuts?

I think that's really the multimillion dollar question. Why is this research being targeted? It's baffled a lot of researchers. It's baffled a lot of patients because cancer research in particular, if we want to zoom in on cancer, has been something that's been

bipartisan. It's been agreed upon by every political party that this is a good thing to fund because it directly contributes to saving patient lives and not just today, but also in the future as these dollars lead to new drugs and new breakthroughs and new understanding of cancer biology that helps us save people from dying of these diseases that we call cancer. And

As the Trump administration has sort of gone in with this sledgehammer or chainsaw, if you will, trying to cut the federal government's budget down wherever they can, a lot of it so far has come in the realm of science and medicine. And I think a lot of people are asking, well, why? Like, why are we doing this, particularly doing this to research that patients depend on?

And then how is the medical community, how are doctors, scientists responding? How are they reconciling in this moment? I think that, I think among the people I've spoken with, researchers, scientists, trainees, graduate students and postdocs and clinicians, at first, I think they were all in shock. You know, people had

I couldn't believe that their funding and their livelihoods were being destroyed in this way from their point of view. And it's not really hyperbole. You know, a lot of young scientists I spoke with said that they didn't know how they were going to get a job in the future if this is what scientific funding looks like in the United States. That, you know, they were probably going to have to leave academia altogether, maybe look for a job in industry or leave this country to try to find a job

you know, a lab somewhere else in the world where they could continue to do this science, which is their passion for many of them. You know, many of these people had wanted to be a scientist or a, you know, physician researcher their whole lives and trained for for many, many years to to be able to do this. And I think, you know, so so many of them were just devastated that they were seeing these opportunities just dry up before their eyes and

Not just that, but I mean, some people had actually been told that they were going to receive grants and later learned that those grants were taken away from them. You know, millions of dollars of research funding that they thought would fund their labs for years in the future and pay for, you know, postdocs and graduate students or their own salaries in the future suddenly gone essentially overnight. And that's awful. You know, it's awful for them as researchers

Because it means they have to lay people off and they don't know what they'll be doing next. So it's tough. And for patients, I think patients are terrified that these cuts will come and impact them somehow or impact their care that they might be receiving if they're looking to get onto a clinical trial. You talked about Natalie Phelps in your story. Give us her story and what are her fears?

Yeah. So Natalie Phelps is a stage four cancer patient. Um, and she, she was diagnosed about five years ago. And, um, since then she has been through sort of dozens of rounds of chemotherapy, multiple surgeries. Um, the cancer continued to spread and retreat as, um,

as these therapies sort of worked, I guess, partially for her. Nothing's cured her as a metastatic colorectal cancer patient.

And so over the last year, she kind of got to this point where she was looking at either doing chemotherapy again or trying to find something novel that might bring her some relief from this cancer. And she got the opportunity to be assessed for a clinical trial at the NIH in Bethesda. This is a trial led by a pioneering immunologist named Steven Rosenberg. And

And she was really, really hopeful for this trial and kind of in the process of being evaluated to see if she was a candidate for it and got really very close. Although, you know, she first actually I should say she first started getting evaluated for this trial in November. And up until now, it was only just a few days ago that she learned she might not be a candidate for this trial and is now looking at a different one. And

As she's looking at these trials at the NIH, she told me that she was just terrified that funding cuts and staffing losses as the sort of HHS goes through these big,

staff terminations, that this trial might not be able to continue or might not be able to enroll her or at the very least delay in enrolling her into a sort of new clinical trial treatment that her cancer will progress to the point where she won't be able to do another trial or at least this trial, one of these trials that she's hoping to get into. And how old is she? And I think she's got two kids. Is that right?

That's right. Yeah, she's got two kids. Natalie is a relatively young patient, I believe. I can't remember her exact age right now. You'll have to forgive me. No, it's okay. I think it was Yeah, I think she was like in her late 30s or something. I'm just I just wanted to kind of paint the picture that this is kind of her only hope to be able to be a mom going forward. Yeah. Are there other types of cancer that are getting hit here? I mean, I'm sorry, which which types are getting hit the worst?

So if you want to look at the CDMRP, that Defense Department program that funds, you know, hundreds of million dollars towards cancer, we're looking at...

Well, really, we're looking at pretty much every area of cancer being hit, but some are hit worse than others. So this program specifically will allocate funding towards certain cancer areas. And in the sort of the proposed budget or the proposed spending plan sent by Congress to the Defense Department,

um they took out all specifically allocated funding to kidney cancer pancreatic cancer lung cancer and a certain kind of brain cancer called glioblastoma um so

So these are cancers that have, you know, particularly like cancers like pancreatic, lung and glioblastoma. These are cancers that have really a high mortality rate. They're difficult cancers to treat. And the field really relied on this funding because it was an important source of dollars to help drive research forward in this critical area. We're talking about cancer funding and how it's getting slashed by the federal government. We'll be right back after this break.

break.

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You're listening to Forum. I'm Leslie McClurg, and we are talking about the impacts of federal funding cuts to cancer research. We're joined by Angus Chen. He's a cancer reporter for Stat News. We are also joined now by Dr. Adil Daud. He is an oncologist and melanoma specialist at UCSF.

And we would love to hear from you. Have you or someone you know benefited from a clinical trial? We'd love to hear about how that experience went for you. Or maybe a loved one's cancer treatment has already been impacted by these federal cuts. We'd love to hear your story. Email your comments, your questions to forum at kqed.org. You can find us on Facebook.

All the social channels, Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram and Discord threads. We're again at KQED Forum. Or you can just jump on the phone now at 866-733-6786. Again, that's 866-733-6786. Dr. Dowd, thank you again for joining us. Can you tell us, has your work been affected by these cuts at all or are you worried that it will be?

Yeah, thanks for having me on. What, yeah, it is immediately impacted because UCSF is on a hiring freeze. And so the whole cancer, I mean, just to take a step back and hopefully not being too verbose here, but the way we find new cancer treatments and deliver new cancer treatments to patients is

is through clinical trials. Like somebody has an idea that has lab testing done and then at a certain point ready to move into human beings. Usually we'll start off with a phase one clinical trial. That's where we're trying to figure out what the right dose is and maybe some preliminary information about efficacy. So for that, you need research nurses and you need clinical research coordinators and you need

coordination with the FDA and with regulatory agencies. So that part is pretty funding and labor and effort intensive. And some of that is paid for by the federal government in the form of clinical trials. Like let's just say you have an idea, like I had an idea to do a clinical trial for types of melanomas that

a rise in the mucus membrane and on your hands and feet, you know, we call them acral melanomas and mucosal melanomas. So you apply for funding to the Defense Department, like Angus was talking about, through the CDMRP program. And that is already pretty competitive. Like only 8 to 10 percent of those grants are awarded. But now there's some uncertainty as to whether those grants

It will be awarded if they are funded and also what the indirect rate is going to be. So that makes a huge difference to UCSF and makes a huge difference to other cancer centers too, because what that supports is all that administrative work.

and staffing structure that's needed behind the scenes to carry out clinical trials. Like that's the research nurses that can draw your blood and that's technicians to spin the blood in the lab and all the other support that you need, you know, for a clinical trial to be done safely. And that's where we're hearing a lot of, you know,

We're experiencing a lot of concern there about what we'll be able to do in the future, you know? Right, right. Rick writes, even though I don't have cancer myself, as a patient at the UCSF Department of Neurological Surgery and at the UCSF Department of Ophthalmology, I would say that not only does Trump want to cut cancer research, but he also wants to cut funding for research related to blindness as well as research related to diabetes.

Angus, is this hitting the medical research in general much broader even than cancer? Yeah, absolutely. You know, I asked people at one point if they felt cancer research was being caught up among all the cuts that are happening across the federal governments. And one person's response was, well, if cancer research is getting caught up in it, then so is heart disease research. And so is, you know, neurological diseases research like Alzheimer's. You know, so is, you know, genetic disorders, all these other things.

From my perspective, you know, looking across where these cuts have come and which programs have been cut, there really almost is no field in science that is untouched by everything that's happened in the last couple of months. Question for you, Dr. Dowd, from a listener. Why is the Defense Department funding cancer research? What is the connection there?

So what has happened historically is that the Defense Department has something called a CDMRP. That's what Angus was talking about. And its purpose is to cover research that affects service members. So it covers things like

melanoma that you might get if you're deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, or it also covers lung cancer that service members are expected to get, and other types of cancers that are related to service.

for reasons that none of us knows for sure, in the CDMRP, melanoma funding actually did survive intact, but they completely zeroed out lung cancer funding, which is kind of surprising. It doesn't make any sense given what someone might be in battle exposed to. Right. There doesn't seem to be like a...

uh you know a tremendously well thought out system of cuts there why why some cancers have survived and why some cancers have totally been cut to zero right except that maybe it's uh

you know, still in negotiation and could be changed. But like the FDA has been cut. So when you approach the FDA for a clinical trial, we expect to see more delays and the regulatory agencies have been cut and I had staff that does what are known as cooperative group trials. So there are, you know, several cooperative groups in the United States

We are part of something called the SWOG, SWOG, or Southwest Oncology Group. Again, that needs funding from the NIH Clinical Center. And so, you know, from just reading the news reports, it seems like one-fourth of the staff at the NIH has been

Wow. And it doesn't seem particularly focused, you know, that includes senior scientists, that includes junior scientists. So hard to say how we'll get clinical trials approved, you know? Right. Let's go to the phones. Christina in Oakland, you're on the air. Hi. Thank you for having me.

I am a survivor of cancer. I was diagnosed last June with a rare form of cancer known as liposarcoma. I had retroperitoneal liposarcoma.

thank goodness, well differentiated, which is not as bad as other types of liposarcoma, but as I understood it, it's a very rare form of cancer. Once I got in the community of people living with liposarcoma and dying with liposarcoma, I realized how very little research and how very little money there is to help with this type of cancer. And all I want to say is

You know, if we look at the statistics, one in two men in the United States will have cancer sometime in their lives, and one in three women in the United States will have cancer in their life. I'm thinking that...

anyone voting for Trump at this time that the NIH is losing money and research is being lost for cancer cures, that they have someone with cancer that has, you know, either passed or been diagnosed with cancer. I just need to know if there is anything that

you know, an average person can do other than coming out of money of our pockets that are already hurting. Christina, I think that's a really good question. Angus, is there anything that the average person can do, especially someone like Christina, who is suffering from cancer?

I think that's a really good question. You know, a lot of patients who are frustrated have been trying to speak out about their experience in the media or on social media and other places, trying to make their voices heard and tell their stories. I think that's a very powerful way to try to push the...

affect the public discourse um and i know that you know lately there's been a lot of people going to town halls or calling the representatives trying to make their voices heard um so i think that's one way that people can try to affect the political process you know without i guess as the caller mentioned um trying to spend a lot of money out their own pocket

Casey on Discord writes, what's happening to funding is a nightmare. Had this happened when I was getting my PhD, I would have been screwed. I don't think the damage being done now will be more than partially remediated later. Vance loves to say that professors and colleges are the enemy. What boggles the mind is that this blanket funding cancellation extends beyond the obvious target of people like me who studied race and culture. When did cancer research become political? Angus? That's a good question. Um,

When is hard to say I think that whether cancer research has become political is Well, I think there's some evidence for that. I

Looking at the Trump administration, the NCI circulated, that's the National Cancer Institute at the NIH, circulated this memo flagging a number of controversial terms for staff. If they come across any documents with these terms, then they should sort of flag it for review. One of those terms was moonshot, the cancer moonshot, which was a signature initiative of President Biden to try to change, quote, change cancer,

um as we know it or change the survive the the death from cancer as we know it um and uh the fact that cancer moonshots is one of these targeted terms i think a lot of people felt that was a sign that cancer research was becoming politicized because it was an important thing to president biden um there's also other things i mean i think we see that um

This may not necessarily be super political, but we have seen that in recent years, there hasn't been a ton of expanded funding for research and cancer research. You know, the last few years, the NIH's funding has been flat, which a lot of people see as a cut because inflation continues to go up.

Renata writes,

My role was to serve on a panel with oncologists and researchers and to provide input on which proposals would likely benefit patients most. Metastatic bladder cancer has no new treatments for patients from 1978 to 2013 because the patient numbers were just too small. This program is crucial to all cancer research, but especially those with low numbers of patients. If you are unlucky enough to get cancer, you should hope to be lucky enough to get one that is well-funded."

Good point there. Dr. Dowd, walk us through how and why a patient, just for those who need a step back, would need a clinical trial.

I think for many reasons, but let's just say you had melanoma and back in 2012, the average survival for a patient with metastatic melanoma was something like seven to nine months. And so that was from the time that you...

had your stage four diagnosis to the time that you maybe passed away. And what happened back in those days is there was research that the immune system could be harnessed to fight melanoma. And there was research in Japan and in the US showing at UC Berkeley

and at Kyoto University showing that there were these checkpoints. Like basically your T cells, when they came into contact with cancer, wanted to kill the cancer, but the cancer produced substances that would stop the T cells. And if you used an antibody to remove those breaks called checkpoints, you could get T cells, your own T cells to kill the cancer. And so because of that, because of these checkpoints,

the survival for stage four melanoma is now six years plus. And that's an enormous amount of time. You know, you could be present for,

weddings and for your grandchildren's birthdays and none of that would have been possible without clinical trials right and so i mean we still have at ucsf patients from that you know first study called keynote 001 who you know are for all practical purposes cancer free and are you know

you know, living normal lives. And that's an enormous difference, right? That it makes. But for the 40% of patients who don't, 40 to 50% of patients who don't respond to checkpoints, there's lots of

ideas on how you could make that happen through targeted therapies, through different checkpoints, not the PD-1 checkpoint, but different checkpoint inhibitors, through something called adoptive cell therapy. And then the one idea that Angus alluded to, using mRNA vaccines to induce responses to cancers that might not have responses. And interestingly, the mRNA vaccines have been

There's a circulated advice not to mention mRNA vaccines in your NIH grant proposal because for whatever reason, putting that vaccine

sprays in can cause your glands to get rejected. And that's a way that cancer researchers have been using to vaccinate against what are known as neoantigens. They're proteins that are produced by cancer that are not produced by the rest of your body. So just using that phrase could cause your gland to get triaged, which is

It kind of all loops back to where this was all seeded, unfortunately, was in, I think, in the pandemic and the great amount of distrust that was built, unfortunately, unfairly, but for the medical community. Let's go back to the phones. Andrew in San Anselmo, you're on the air.

Hi, how are you? Thank you for taking my call. And I'll try to keep this short. I'm a cancer survivor of 40 years, having participated in a federal study that was funded by the government using a standard

chemotherapy method, but coupled with a new experimental drug called, I think, 5-fluorouracil. And my cancer had gone undiagnosed or misdiagnosed for

three years, I didn't have irritable bowel syndrome. I had a tumor and it grew outside of my colon and into the muscle wall. The doctors were very businesslike when they did the surgery, when it was finally diagnosed. And that told me that I was probably a goner. But

They got the tumor and I lost some large intestine, but what really happened was I did this federal study and I spent a year on this experimental chemo. And I dare say that it might easily have come back, but well, here I am. The thing is, is that... That's such a great... Andrew, we're moving on to a break, so I unfortunately have to cut you off, but congratulations. And I'm so glad that you are here today.

We are talking about the impacts of federal funding cuts to cancer research.

We are joined by Angus Chen. He's a cancer reporter with Stat News and also Dr. Adil Daud. He is an oncologist and melanoma specialist at UCSF. And we would love to hear from you. Maybe you, like Andrew, have a personal story of how a clinical trial impacted your life. Maybe you're alive today, just like Andrew is, because a clinical trial helped your cure.

Has your loved one maybe received cancer treatment? Maybe they've been impacted by these federal cuts. I'd love to hear a story about someone who actually feels the ripple of what's happening right now. Email your comments, your questions to forum at kqed.org. You can also find us on all the social channels, Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, Discord threads. Again, we're at KQED Forum. Or you can just give us a call right now at 866-

733-6786. Again, that's 866-733-6786. We'd love to hear from you. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break.

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You're listening to Forum. I'm Leslie McClurg. I'm in today for Mina Kim, and we are talking about the impacts of federal funding cuts to cancer research. We are joined by Angus Chen. He's a cancer reporter for Stat News. We are also joined by Dr. Adil Daud. He is an oncologist and melanoma specialist at UCSF. We'd love to hear from you. Maybe you know someone who has benefited from a clinical trial. Maybe that's you. Tell us your story. Maybe a loved one.

might be impacted by these cuts. We'd love to hear that story. Email your comments and questions to forum at kqed.org or jump on the phone right now, 866-733-6786. Again, that's 866-733-6786.

Christopher writes, my mom went through a trial to try and treat basal cell carcinoma-related skin cancer through a pill. And while it didn't cure it, it did help. Knowing that the funding required to stop her from needing yearly surgeries could be cut hurts. Another listener on Discord writes, I'm quite anxious about cuts to funding, though I haven't heard of any yet affecting my father yet.

Not only does he receive all health care through the VA, the Veterans Administration, his cancer treatments are through Stanford, some of which are new enough to not know long-term effects. How do I find out about cuts to his treatment or research? Is that online? Angus, is there any way to know where these cuts are being hit or where they're unfolding?

I think that if you're concerned about a specific trial, the best thing to do is to stay in contact with that trial coordinator. There is usually a patient coordinator that helps patients with trials or trying to stay in contact with the trial investigators themselves. Otherwise,

I think probably the best way to keep an eye on what research is being hit, whether there are certain grant cancellations or terminations that are big that you might be concerned about is through trusted media. We write about that sometimes over at statnews.com and I write about big cancer programs that might be getting cut as well. And I'm looking out for patients who are interested

were affected by these cuts. So you can read about it over on our website. - Thank you, Angus. - I wanted to just respond a little bit to the last caller who talked about a treatment that he received from a federally funded trial. I think a lot of people don't always realize what an impact federally funded research has done for cancer.

Since 1991, there has been a 34% decline in the rate of cancer death in this country. And that's really directly because of NIH-funded research and other federally funded research for cancer. If you think about the people you know who've survived from cancer or are going through cancer today,

today, many of them are alive right now. Like many of the people walking around on the street right now that you might look around and see would not be there today if it wasn't for some of this funding. So just something to think about. Absolutely. Let's go back to the phones. Pat in Los Gatos, you're on the air.

I wanted to talk about my experience and it goes back 13 years when I was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer and at that time I was 65 and too old for clinical trials but fortunately there was recent research back there back then that showed that it might be more important for a young donor

than a young recipient. So I was put in a federal trial for my bone marrow cancer and I went through the transplant and it was successful. And fortunately, I recuperated totally and I was able then to go back to work as a physician and enter the Corps of Doctors at Santa Clara County taking care of COVID patients.

And I was able to contribute three more years to my career, taking care of COVID patients and saving several of the patients who caught COVID. So clinical trials have a vast benefit to our entire civilization. And the rest of the world looks to us for what I was able to receive at Stanford down in Palo Alto.

Thank you, Pat, for your story. And thank you for saving those lives during the pandemic. Really appreciate you sharing your story. Let's stick with the phones. Carl in Davis, you're on the air.

Hi, I just want to bring up the fact that as a veterinary clinician scientist at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, I want to reflect on the fact that healthcare is integrated across species. So what we do in veterinary patients and our clinical trials that allow us to integrate

perform these experimental and clinical trials that lead to improvements in spontaneous cancer in our patients, this leads to improvements and faster movement into human clinical trials and vice versa. Like our veterinary team takes information from the medical system

and moves it into health care improvements for our veterinary patients as well. I can't just say that it's physicians and humans. It's really physicians, veterinarians, public scientists, public health. All the health care professions are really integrated, and losing funding in any one area is certainly going to impact other areas. Good point. Thank you, Carl.

A listener on Discord writes, I'm the VP of research at a precision oncology startup. We work with organizations like the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network to publish studies using real-world evidence because the NIH has historically underfunded this research. If universities must bend to their knees to keep their funding, is there any way for states to use the 10th Amendment to refund science and skirt around corruption? Any thoughts there, Angus? That's a good question.

I don't know. This is a very much a legal question that I'm not an expert on. I'll turn sort of somewhat orthogonally to this. People have also wondered if states might be able to subsidize the funding that might be lost from federal sources to universities in their state. The short answer to this is no. States just cannot subsidize.

States just don't have the money to do that. The amount of dollars that go currently from state budgets towards public universities is it varies from state to state and institution to institution. But when I've looked, it's been usually less than three or five percent of that university's budget, much, much, much less than what the federal government provides.

Dr. Dowd, has the medical community ever faced anything like this before during your career? Are you familiar? Has we ever gone through something like this, an attack like this? You know, that's a great question. We've had some really major cutbacks in funding. But the problem now is, and I'm just speaking on behalf of some of my junior colleagues,

You know, most researchers have like a timeline where you have to get a grant if you want to stay in research. And that period is about three years, three to five years, you know, depending on which you can get extensions. If your department chair thinks there's something exceptional. And so for a lot of our junior colleagues,

The crunch time is right now, and if you don't get funding in, say, two or three cycles where you're resubmitting the grants with all the comments that reviewers have made addressed, you basically have to move on to some different field of work. And if things stay the same for the next three and a half years, which it seems like they might stay the same,

Now, I think a lot of what I'm hearing from people is that they'll try one more time or two more times and then they might have to shutter up their labs and move someplace else. The only problem is that this weekend I was at a conference, a melanoma conference, and

And so I heard from people at different universities that everything from funding freeze to some one university researcher told me that they basically were told not to attend any meetings anymore because they're trying to conserve money. But

you know, that is also counterproductive, right? If you don't exchange ideas, you don't, the whole point of, you know, doing research is that you disseminate your findings so somebody else can maybe reproduce them or maybe incorporate them into a new clinical trial. And so,

It's that loss of research infrastructure that at least, I did my fellowship in 2000, completed my fellowship in 2001. So this is my 24th year, I guess. I haven't experienced anything this drastic. Even the budget cuts in the past have been measured and we've had reasons for funding cuts, but here it seems like the goal might be to just,

slash research infrastructure even.

Joe writes, "I'm living with stage four metastatic kidney cancer and I'm under treatment by UCSF neuro-oncology for brain tumors that resulted from the cancer. And I often participate in advocacy days with the KidneyCan organization where we make calls to government officials to ask specifically for NIH and CDMRP funding. Coincidentally, our recent advocacy days was the same day the House was voting on the continuing resolution, so it was a bit too late.

There was little to no mention in the media about cancer research being defunded at the time of the CR voting in the House and Senate. It's lovely to hear this discussion today, but it's after the fact, and I think this would have had a greater effect on the voting. My life truly depends on research and innovative trials. Angus, would you like to respond to either what Dr. Dowd just said or to what Joe wrote? Sure. I think, you know, Joe is...

Referring to the fact that the loss in cancer funding in the CR, it kind of went a little bit under the radar. Some people, I think, had reported on it, but it wasn't really highlighted as much in the news until after the fact. I agree with that. And it's definitely a...

a reminder to those of us who write about this and those of us in the media to step our game up, I think. And so thank you, Joe, for that. It's so important to our mission to try to bring you the news and vital information as soon as possible.

As for what Dr. Dow was talking about, you know, whether anything like this has happened before, really, really, I haven't seen anything quite like the cuts that have happened in the last couple of months or even the proposed cuts. The indirect rate cuts

cut that we discussed earlier that that was talked about in the 90s during the Clinton administration, actually. But it didn't really go through because there was so much pushback on sort of slashing the indirect rates. You know, people at the time had argued that these dollars are so vital to supporting research infrastructure. And and that was kind of part of the thing that was driving the American biomedical industry forward.

People have continued to say that now and this time around. And so far, the only thing that has held that policy back is an injunction from a federal court.

You're listening to Forum. I'm Leslie McClurg. I'm in today for Mina Kim. We are talking about all the federal cuts to cancer research and medical research in general. We are joined by Angus Chen. He's a cancer reporter for Stat News and Dr. Adil Daud. He's an oncologist and melanoma specialist at UCSF.

A listener on Blue Sky writes, why do some universities suck up 60% of the grant to cover overhead? Those are the indirect cuts that Angus was just mentioning. The average overhead percentage is supposedly 30 to 35%. Do any universities provide a breakdown of how these overhead percentages are spent? Angus?

Yeah, so you can look inside public university budgets to try to get a sense of where dollars are going. And you can get a little bit of a sense of how overhead dollars or indirect dollars are being spent.

They aren't directly accounted for in the same way direct dollars are. And that's a little bit by design because it's hard to account for things like your monthly electricity bill and the plumbing and all these different things that happen on a day to day basis that are actually paid for by indirect costs. But you can you can see how many know what the rate every university or in every research institution gets from the federal government, because that's publicly published.

And the average that you're talking about is across all institutions. You know, a lot of institutions that do a lot of research. So, you know, we're talking about like the University of Alabama, Birmingham. We're talking about University of Texas, you know, UCSF, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, whatever, like any kind of research university that does a lot of research. Often these rates are above 50 percent. And so

The policy that was put briefly into place by the NIH was to cap that at 15%, which many universities and many experts said would just cripple research infrastructure in the United States. You know, losses of over $100 million per year per institution for many institutions. But, you know, now I think what's happened is that

That policy has not gone through because of the federal court injunction. But nobody expects this rate to remain untouched. People know everyone I've spoken with says that they believe that the indirect rate is going to be up for negotiation at some point. And the Trump administration sounds like it's very interested in bringing that rate down somewhere. The where that number lands is going to be really, really important for the continued support of Republicans.

biomedical research infrastructure in the United States. Is there any possibility that the private sector will step in here to make up the difference or fill the gap?

The private sector is already trying to step in and fill in the gap wherever they can. And when I say the private sector, I'm mostly talking about private foundations, like philanthropic foundations that give money to research every single year. Some of these foundations have tried to draw more from their endowments. So the MacArthur Foundation is a good example of this. They increased their endowment giving by 1%, which for them is actually a large sum of money because they have a very big endowment.

Other foundations have tried to sort of draw more money from wherever they can to try to support research during this time when a lot of funds seem to be delayed or frozen. That being said, private foundations just cannot make up the deficit if there is a big drop in, let's say, the indirect rate. The NIH gives, you know,

tens of billions of dollars out every single year and private foundations probably give about five billion dollars in annual direct research funding. So it's just it's not really on the same scale at all. There's there's almost no there's not enough private foundation money in the space currently to make up that deficit. And industry

Industry will likely continue as they have been. Industry has pharmaceutical companies and biotechs and things like that. They have their own interest in pushing forward their clinical trials and paying for them because they want to bring drugs to market. But the

You know, at some point, what if universities are sort of cut off at their knees because their research infrastructure dollars are gone? That will come to impact biotechs and pharmaceutical companies at some point down the road, you know, many years down the road, because a lot of the discoveries that turn into new drugs at pharmaceutical companies, they start in university centers and they go through what's called the tech transfer office to become part of that clinical research pipeline that turns into the drugs of tomorrow.

Tali writes, I've been a physician in the Bay Area in practice for over 20 years. And about 15 years ago, one of my current patients was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma. Her family was expecting their first grandchild. And at the time, her goal was to still be alive when the baby was born. And with the incredible progress of the newest cancer treatment supported by NIH and the federal government, she is alive over a decade later, surrounded by grandkids. So many families will be impacted by these cuts.

Sue writes, we need to remember that each individual caller with a survivor story represents a multitude of such survivor stories. This research is so very vital to our lives. We've been talking about the impacts of federal funding cuts to cancer research, and we've been joined by Angus Chen, cancer reporter at Stat News. Thank you, Angus, for being here. Thank you. Thanks for having me. And Dr. Adil Daud, again, oncologist and melanoma specialist at UCSF. Thank you, Dr. Daud.

Thank you so much for highlighting this issue, Leslie. And thanks to all of our callers and listeners. I really appreciate you sharing personal stories today. I'm Leslie McClurg in for Meena Kim. She'll be back tomorrow. Thanks for listening.

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