Three-quarters of cancer research funding is going into work that aims to further our understanding of the disease, but usually does not involve or benefit patients directly. — dpa
Cancer research funding involves big money, with over US$24 billion (RM110.77 billion) spent worldwide between 2016 and 2020.
But most of that outlay did not go into primary treatment research in fields such as surgery, which got 1.4%, and radiotherapy, which received almost 3%.
According research by Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Southampton, both in the United Kingdom, around three-quarters of the funding went to pre-clinical or medicinal research that does not involve patients.
And although the pre-clinical research “has inherent value in improving the knowledge and understanding of cancer, there are usually lengthy delays translating this to patient benefit, with time lags of up to 17 years cited,” the two university teams said.
Published in the journal Lancet Oncology this month (June 2023), “the first comprehensive global analysis of cancer research funding” assessed US$24.5bil (RM113.08bil) of global investment from over 66,000 public and philanthropic awards.
The number-crunching done by the researchers suggested that global cancer research funding had been dropping year-by-year, with the biggest fall seen between 2019 and 2020.
”There is an urgent need to look at research funding priorities globally to ensure that finite resources can be used to maximise patient benefit,” said Dr Stuart McIntosh, clinical reader from the Patrick G Johnston Centre for Cancer Research at Queen’s University Belfast.
”Our analysis has shown that current cancer research investment does not align well with either the current global distribution of cancer, including overarching cancer control strategies, nor with the main treatments that are used for patients with cancer,” he added. – dpa
