Report finds that many of the deadliest cancers are among the most poorly funded.

Abstract

A study published in the Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network found that many of the deadliest or most common cancers receive the least amount of research funding from nonprofit organizations.1 According to the study, which was led by investigators from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, the list of poorly funded but common diseases includes colon, endometrial, liver and bile duct, cervical, ovarian, pancreatic, and lung cancers. Meanwhile, those that are well funded with respect to their impact level on the population include breast cancer, leukemia, lymphoma, and pediatric cancers. According to the authors, the goal of this study was to expand funding for cancers that are not receiving enough. Corresponding author Suneel Kamath, MD, an oncologist at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, said that, to their knowledge, it is the first study to compare nonprofit funding nationwide across cancer type. Dr. Kamath was chief fellow in hematology and oncology at Northwestern at the time the study was conducted. “These are all deadly and life-altering diseases that deserve our attention and support,” he says. For their analysis, investigators identified nonprofit organizations by using Internal Revenue Service tax records to determine which ones support any type of cancer and made at least $5 million in annual revenue in 2015. They conducted the study between October 2017 and February 2018 and analyzed 119 organizations with a total of $5.98 billion in annual revenue. Most of that revenue, approximately $4.59 billion, went to general cancer charities such as the American Cancer Society. To determine the amount of funding for each cancer in proportion to how common or deadly it is, the researchers compared the amount of revenue for each cancer type with the number of new cases, the number of deaths, and the number of years of life lost.