Cancer campaigners seek research funding boost

The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) is urging Congress to provide the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and its National Cancer Institute (NCI) with annual budget increases of at least 8 per cent.

That figure is 5 per cent over the biomedical inflation rate of roughly 3 per cent, but “the NIH has lost 13 percent of its purchasing power over 8 years because of flat funding and inflation,” AACR said in a cancer progress report on 20 September.