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  • Home > Blog > Treatment News > AACR Encourages Congress to Increase NIH Funding to Benefit Research for Incurable Diseases Including Mesothelioma and Other Cancers
Posted on Friday, Sep 23, 2011

AACR Encourages Congress to Increase NIH Funding to Benefit Research for Incurable Diseases Including Mesothelioma and Other Cancers

Personalized medicine is considered the wave of the future in the effective treatment of cancer patients.  When treating mesothelioma, an asbestos-caused cancer, physicians have found that by tailoring the treatment to an individual’s unique characteristics they optimize the potential for success by offering the right treatment at the right time.  Just as personalized medicine is gaining momentum, however, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has announced budget cuts that could impact research breakthroughs in the United States.

The NIH website states that they are “the nation’s medical research agency—supporting scientific studies that turn discovery into health.”  Currently, NIH is the primary sponsor of 17 open mesothelioma clinical trials, including a promising study of IMC-A12 that disrupts mesothelioma cell growth, and their announced $322 million budget cut could cause a setback in the continued research for a mesothelioma cure.

Ongoing research is being conducted to find effective treatments for mesothelioma, but it is still considered to be an incurable disease in the medical community.  The cancer can affect the lining of the lungs, abdomen or heart, and although it can be treated with varying degrees of success with surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, there is no known cure for the cancer.

The American Association of Cancer Research (AACR), the oldest and largest scientific organization in the world focused on innovative cancer research, has responded to the proposed budget cut in their AACR Cancer Progress Report 2011 released this week.

Presented as “a call to action for the general public and for lawmakers to intensify their efforts in supporting cancer and biomedical research,” the authors urge Congress to halt the budget cut, and instead, “provide the NIH and NCI with sustained budget increases of at least 5 percent above the biomedical inflation rate.”

“Sustained funding increases for the NIH and NCI are an urgent national priority that will improve the health of Americans and strengthen America’s innovation and economy,” said AACR Immediate Past President Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Ph.D., Nobel Laureate and Morris Herzstein professor of biology and physiology at the University of California, San Francisco.

The AACR further stated now “it is urgent that scientific momentum be maintained for the benefit of cancer patients and for all those who will be diagnosed with cancer in the future.”  Close to 3,000 Americans are diagnosed with mesothelioma each year.  According to the American Cancer Society, about 569,490 Americans were expected to die of all types of cancer in 2010. 

Recent findings in the identification of biomarkers and a person’s genetic makeup to determine the course of treatment for many diseases is critical to the success of America’s healthcare.  The AACR report indicates that the new knowledge in this area is “essential to uncovering the biomarkers that will drive the development of highly effected targeted therapies, predict risk for specific cancers, and allow clinicians to develop individual treatment options and prevention strategies for their patients.”