NCI leadership presented the institute's proposed budget for fiscal year 2007 to the National Cancer Advisory Board (NCAB) at today's meeting. President Bush's FY 2007 budget request to Congress this week included a request of $4.754 billion for NCI - a decrease of $39.7 million from the funds available for the current year (see chart). For the entire National Institutes of Health (NIH), the funds available are $28.6 billion, the same amount from FY 2006.

Among the policies and initiatives included within the President's request are several with direct implications for NCI:  Read more  



Guest Update by Dr. John E. Niederhuber

Clinical Trial Program Restructuring Advancing Quickly

A new NCI organizational structure, designed to oversee the institute's entire clinical trials enterprise, was unveiled today at the NCAB meeting.

The reorganization is the direct result of recommendations issued last June by the Clinical Trials Working Group (CTWG). At the NCAB meeting, Dr. James Doroshow, director of the Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis and co-chair of CTWG, described the structural components that will support this effort, which include the Clinical Trials Advisory Committee (CTAC), Clinical Trials Operations Committee (CTOC), and the Coordinating Center for Clinical Trials (CCCT).

CTAC is an external oversight committee, governed by the provisions of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, that will advise the NCI Director on the institute's Clinical Trials Program and will include members of NCAB as well as other NCI advisory boards and additional cancer clinical trials experts. CTAC will oversee implementation of CTWG initiatives, including a review of the system to evaluate and measure the effects of the implementation. CTAC also will provide advice on the use of "correlative science funds," additional funding allotted to specific clinical trials for correlative science and quality-of-life studies.  Read more  

The NCI Cancer Bulletin is produced by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). NCI, which was established in 1937, leads the national effort to eliminate the suffering and death due to cancer. Through basic, clinical, and population-based biomedical research and training, NCI conducts and supports research that will lead to a future in which we can identify the environmental and genetic causes of cancer, prevent cancer before it starts, identify cancers that do develop at the earliest stage, eliminate cancers through innovative treatment interventions, and biologically control those cancers that we cannot eliminate so they become manageable, chronic diseases. For more information on cancer, call 1-800-4-CANCER or visit http://www.cancer.gov. NCI Cancer Bulletin staff can be reached at ncicancerbulletin@mail.nih.gov.