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. 2023 Oct 9;115(10):1220-1223.
doi: 10.1093/jnci/djad097.

Urgent need to mitigate disparities in federal funding for cancer research

Shida Haghighat  1 , Chunsu Jiang  1 , Wael El-Rifai  2   3 , Alexander Zaika  2   3 , David S Goldberg  1   2 , Shria Kumar  1   2
Affiliations

Urgent need to mitigate disparities in federal funding for cancer research

Shida Haghighat et al. J Natl Cancer Inst. .

Abstract

We evaluate National Cancer Institute (NCI) funding distribution to the most common cancers, considering their respective public health burdens, and explore associations between funding and racial and ethnic burden of disease. The NCI's Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results, US Cancer Statistics database, and Funding Statistics were used to calculate funding-to-lethality (FTL) scores. Breast and prostate cancer had the first (179.65) and second (128.90) highest FTL scores, and esophagus and stomach cancer ranked 18th (2.12) and 19th (1.78). We evaluated whether there were differences between the FTL and cancer incidence and/or mortality within individual racial and ethnic groups. NCI funding correlated highly with cancers afflicting a higher proportion of non-Hispanic White individuals (Spearman correlation coefficient = 0.84; P < .001). Correlation was stronger for incidence than mortality. These data reveal that funding across cancer sites is not concordant with lethality and that cancers with high incidence among racial and ethnic minorities receive lower funding.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no personal, professional, or financial conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Bar graph depicting funding-to-lethality ratios by cancer site. NH = non-Hodgkin.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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