The Nation's Investment in Cancer Research

Building the Right Kind of NCI for the Future

Building Capacity

In the years since the doubling of the NIH budget (in fact, about an 85 percent increase for NCI over five years, not considering medical inflation), we have learned that building a better, more effective research infrastructure takes time, careful planning, and ongoing support. NCI’s portfolio is a complex mix of thousands of contracts and grants to outside researchers, combined with the support of the hundreds of scientists who work in our labs on the Bethesda NIH campus and in Frederick, Md. We fund individual investigators working on hypothesis-driven science and large, collaborative, technology-driven projects. In many cases, a grant NCI funds is a five-year commitment of resources, which must be fulfilled, even if budgets are flat or go down. NCI has had to make the difficult choice recently of reducing the dollar amount of our grants, often by 25 percent or more. The result has been labs that have reduced the scope of their research and labs that have reduced staff, or taken on fewer young investigators.

Consequently, NCI’s first job, were it to receive more funding, would be to help increase America’s research capacity in several areas:

• Funding scientists. In academic cancer research, obtaining tenure is most often tied closely to getting — and renewing — an NCI grant. We have an obligation to help young investigators navigate the arduous grant application process and make sure their academic homes have mentoring committees in place. We must strive to assure that new faculty members are not just adequately funded for their research, but that they are primed for success from the outset.

• Fostering the next generation. Much has been discussed in recent years about the graying of America’s scientific workforce, and the dearth of great new scientific minds entering cancer research. We must work, in every way possible, to foster scientific careers, to increase diversity among the scientific workforce, to advance scientific education and to make research a rewarding career that will keep our cancer research labs focused and thriving.

• Supporting technology. The equipment necessary to conduct high-volume genomic sequencing has become faster, even as it has greatly fallen in price. In time, most physicians will have each patient’s complete genetic profile available. Until that day comes, however, whole-genome sequencing, characterization, and analysis remain outside the capacity of most researchers. For just that reason, NCI envisions several strategically placed genomic research centers that could serve the entire research community.

• Supporting research infrastructure. In the early years of this century, as research universities received large increases in their funding from NCI and NIH, the construction crane was a common site on hundreds of campuses. In the years since, as research funding has flattened, many of those structures are underused and ill-equipped. Greater NCI funding will, indeed, help universities hire more research faculty; those dollars will also help fulfill the physical capacity of research institutions.