Straight from the source
On the whole, funding for cancer research has been doing quite well. It continues to increase and, at the federal level, has nearly doubled since 1997. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), and in particular the National Cancer Institute (NCI), have earned solid backing from Congress. For 2002, the NCI received about $4.17 billion, up from $2.7 billion in 1997; it sought more than $5 billion for the 2003 fiscal year. Similarly, at DFCI, total research awards grew 57 percent during the five-year period between 1997 and 2002.
The backbone of U.S. cancer research funding is direct federal grants to individual investigators and collaborations. About 5,000 cancer researchers, including many at Dana-Farber, garner NCI support each year after committees of scientists review tens of thousands of grant applications (see sidebar, From idea to grant: a long road). The agency now can fund only about 27 percent of its applications, which officials there say leaves many promising projects unsupported.
These direct federal grants pay the lion's share — about $100 million — of the Institute's annual bill for research, which amounts to around $162 million. To cover the balance, DFCI depends on a combination of sources, among them gifts, grants from organizations like the American Cancer Society, and drug companies' payments for clinical trials carried out here.
Gifts include everything from contributions made by families of patients, to corporate giving, to millions raised by the annual Pan-Massachusetts Challenge bike-a-thon and the Boston Marathon® Jimmy Fund Walk, to quarters dropped in movie-theater canisters to benefit the Jimmy Fund, Dana-Farber's grass-roots fundraising arm.
The DFCI Development Office collected an impressive $85 million in Fiscal Year 2002, much of it earmarked for particular investigators or specific research uses, such as genomics, leukemia, or breast cancer. Most money raised under the Jimmy Fund banner is unrestricted and helps make up budget shortfalls in research and patient care.
Cutting-edge research today is focusing on fundamental mechanisms of cancer, rather than fitting neatly into disease categories. An example of work crossing disease boundaries is angiogenesis, the headline-making process by which small tumors attract new blood vessels that nourish their growth. In addition, the Institute needs critical "infrastructure" upgrades such as equipment or space used by many different investigators. Therefore, "unrestricted funds provide the maximum flexibility to allocate a donor's gift to the most pressing needs of the Institute," says Susan Paresky, senior vice president for development.
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