On Monday, National Cancer Institute (NCI) Director John E. Niederhuber addressed the American Association for Cancer Research's 100th annual meeting in Denver, CO.
"We come together at a time that is truly like no other," he acknowledged, noting that even in the home county of the National Institute of Health (NIH), food stamp applications are up 16% from a year ago, and the family shelters are full.
Scientists everywhere, Niederhuber said, have felt the strain of NCI budgets that have been flat for four years, as grantmakers have reduced grants by an average of 17 to 21% from the requested levels. Even as individual grants were being downsized, he noted in a follow-up press conference, grant application success rates fell to about to about one in five.
The future outlook is improving, he said, thanks to the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act signed into law on Feb. 17. The package's $10.4 billion earmarked for the NIH includes $1.3 billion for the NCI over 2009 and 2010.
"When it became clear that economic stimulus funds would be coming to NCI," Niederhuber told his audience, "we began, as you might expect, to carefully consider where $1.3 billion in new resources could do the most good; where the demand was greatest; where our knowledge of the biology of cancer and new technology were leading us. Given that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, we also thought long and hard about what Americans want from all of us. We came back repeatedly, in these discussions, to the conclusion that they want better ways to prevent cancer; they want the earliest diagnosis; and they want new therapies with fewer side-effects that turn cancer into a condition you can live with and not die from."
The stimulus funds are separate from a 3% increase in NIH's appropriation. Niederhuber cautioned that the stimulus money cannot be mixed with regular appropriations and that different rules will apply in their distribution.
"A week ago," Niederhuber said, "our first package of stimulus grant funding plans moved out of NCI, to go through a final administrative approval process. As the availability of funds nears, I am now able to offer you some broad highlights."
NCI is taking steps to increase support for Research Project Grants (RPG), particularly investigator initiated R01s. In fiscal 2009, RPG payline will be rising considerably, from last year's 12th percentile to a 16th percentile for 2009.
Through "coordinated but separate administrations of stimulus and appropriated funds, NCI will, like many of its fellow NIH institutes and centers, raise the payline to the 25th percentile."
Niederhuber also announced what he called key initiatives to "unlock cancer's genetically driven pathways and move them forward to first-in-man studies." These include such projects as the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), aimed at identifying the relevant genomic alterations in 20 to 25 major tumor types, and TARGET (Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatments), which will apply next-generation sequencing to at least 100 tumor specimens per childhood cancer.