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Some of the United States' biggest cancer-research funders have been ramping down their annual increase in funding over the past decade, according to a new analysis.
The US National Cancer Institute (NCI) — the world’s largest cancer-research funder — spent US$25.01 billion on cancer-related grants between 2015 and 2024. Data from the Digital Science Dimensions database, extracted by the Nature Research Intelligence team, show that during this time, the NCI’s yearly funding increases have been slowing down. From 2016 to 2017, there was an increase of almost 50%, but from 2022 to 2023, the increase was only 2%.
In 2024, NCI recorded a large fall in grant funding, but the reasons are unclear. One challenge when interpreting grants data is the delay between when the grants are awarded and when the resulting publications are produced. Often, funding information in Dimensions is only recorded once it is able to be linked to the resulting research paper, which means the trends should not be interpreted in isolation.
The US National Institute of General Medical Sciences, another of the United States’s most important cancer research funders, has also seen a fall in its annual funding increases, having reported a 4% increase from 2022 to 2023, down from 73% in the year to 2017.
By contrast, the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs, a US federal funding stream under the US Department of Defense, grew its spend at an annual rate of approximately 19% between 2020 and 2024.
The European Commission, which invests in science through the European Union’s ‘Horizon’ funding programmes, spent $3.39 billion on cancer-related grants between 2015 and 2024. After cutting funds of almost 5% in 2022, the institution then saw a major increase in its spending in 2023, from $263.39 million in 2022 to $416.20 million in 2023.
Data on funding are not comprehensive, as many funders do not publish or allow access to their grants data. But, they do give a good insight into where some countries' and institutions' priorities may lie.
The United States has spent more on cancer research than any other country, but research-funding delays and cuts since President Donald Trump took office for the second time could threaten this.
Understanding where research funds are most needed can help to inform policy. A popular metric for measuring the impact of a certain disease or condition is Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALY), which accounts for the impact of living with a disability and/or dying prematurely as a result of that disease or condition.
The Dimensions analysis looked at funding amounts for grants related to several health categories in the 2015–24 time period. When the DALYs for these categories are divided by the amount of funding they receive, it’s possible to see which conditions command the most funding related to their impact.
Cancer, which receives the second-highest funding amount in this selected list below, has the fourth-largest dollar-per-DALY amount, at $236.22. The ‘metabolic and endocrine conditions’ category, which receives a moderate amount of funding, has the lowest DALY rates, which puts its dollar-per-DALY amount at $603.30.
Among the major grant-funding recipients for cancer research are Leidos, a Viriginia-based company specializing in defence, aviation, information technology and biomedical research, and a number of American universities, the Karolinska Institutet, in Solna, Sweden, and the University of Cambridge, UK. (It is important to note that some countries, such as China, are not well represented in the Dimensions grant funding database.)
Leidos may see its funding amounts change drastically in the coming years, if a decision by the US National Institutes of Health to hand a major contract to a University of California-led alliance in January goes ahead.
For 25 years, Leidos has held a contract to manage the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, in Maryland. A new version of that contract, worth a potential $89 billion, is set to go to the Alliance for Advancing Biomedical Research, a group created by the University of California system, unless successfully appealed by Leidos.
