Billions is spent on cancer research globally – but is it money well spent?

• Poorer countries will be especially hard hit, with an increasing number of cases and more deaths, compared with richer countries.
• Cancer research is vital to helping ease this global burden, but where and how research money is spent doesn’t always match with where and how help is needed.
• To get a clearer picture of where cancer research funding is spent, we collected and compiled data covering public and charitable cancer research investments, globally, between 2016 and 2020, inclusive.
• By country, the US provided 57.3% of the total cancer research funding awarded, with the US National Institute of Health being by far the biggest funder.

Lung and thyroid cancers least funded

• Our analysis compares the level of funding given to researching different types of cancers with the health burden of those types of cancer.
• In terms of the type of research, preclinical research (typically laboratory studies) received US$18 billion (73.5%).
• Our results suggest that lung cancer was particularly poorly funded.
• Here, thyroid cancer came out as least-well funded.
• Both lung and thyroid cancers were judged to be the least well-funded cancer conditions overall, compared to their global burdens.

Cancer funding fell 45%

• This might have been a natural fluctuation – cancer funding levels were declining to some extent – but it’s possible the drop was caused by a diversion of funds into COVID research.
• It’s also likely that these drops in funding will mean less new knowledge coming through the cancer research pipeline.
• Our analysis showed the flow of funding into cancer research.
• Ramsey Cutress receives grant funding from the NIHR, Prevent breast cancer, World Cancer Research Fund, Association of Breast Surgery, Astra Zeneca and institutional research support from seca.