Abstract
Cancer research is deficient in Colombia and efforts and resources diverted due to the COVID-19 pandemic could worsen the situation. We explore the impact of the pandemic on cancer research funding, output, and conduct. We sought information at national level and used the experience of an academic reference center to contrast the impact at institutional level. We searched databases and official documents of national governmental institutions, trial registries, hospital registries, and the Web of Science. We interviewed principal investigators (PIs) to retrieve information on the conduct of cancer research. A decline in resource availability and new proposals was observed at the national level with a shift to COVID-19 related research. However, at institutional level there was no decline in the number of cancer research proposals. The predominance of observational studies as opposed to the preponderance of clinical trials and basic science in high-income countries may be related to the lower impact at institutional level. Nevertheless, we found difficulties similar to previous reports for conducting research during the pandemic. PIs reported long recovery times and a great impact on research other than clinical trials, such as observational and qualitative studies. No significant impact on research output was observed. Alternatives to ensure research continuity such as telemedicine and remote data collection have scarcely been implemented given limited access and low technology literacy. In this middle-income setting the situation shows a notable dependency of international collaborations to develop research on COVID-19 and cancer and to overcome challenges for cancer research during the pandemic.
Highlights
Colombia is an upper-middle income country with deficient investment in cancer research
In this article we aimed to explore the influence of the pandemic on cancer research in Colombia, a middle-income country, using national data and the experience of a reference academic center (San Ignacio University Hospital – HUSI in the Spanish acronym), as related to the restrictive measures and abrupt changes that occurred in the time of COVID-19
Data on COVID-19 research should be interpreted with caution since the reported number of projects by Minciencias in 2021 essentially corresponds to projects within the calls for the economic recovery of the country (Figure 1A), and INVIMA reports only 33 COVID-19 related studies, which are 17 less than the number registered in ClinicalTrials.gov
Summary
Colombia is an upper-middle income country with deficient investment in cancer research. The Colombian research and development expenditure as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was 0.24% in 2018 [1], an investment below most countries in the region with similar GDP. The count of scientific papers for different Latin American countries compared with their gross domestic products shows a positive relationship, the association of cancer research as percentage of biomedical research with cancer as percentage of total disability-adjusted life years (DALYS) in the country is deficient [2]. In ordinary times, the Colombian scientific productivity and impact factor around cancer are lower than observed for other Latin American countries with a similar income level. A more recent review revealed an increase in cancer research productivity as measured by the number of scientific publications (1,263 papers between 2014 and 2019), but no major change in research focus and methods [2]
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