Billions spent on cancer research globally – but is it money well spent? Premium
The Hindu
To get a clearer picture of where cancer research funding is spent, scientists collected data covering public and charitable cancer research investments between 2016 and 2020
In 2020, 19 million people around the world received a cancer diagnosis. By 2040, that number is expected to reach 28 million. 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. This amounted to US$24.5 billion (£19.7 billion) of investment across 66,388 research grants.
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. Most of the world’s biggest funders are transparent about their funding decisions, providing data on their grants. This allows for scrutiny around their portfolios and allows those who set funding priorities to better understand how to allocate limited resources for health research.
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Among the major global health funders, Cancer Research UK is one of the few that does not provide data on funding at the individual award level. They rely on top-level summaries in annual reports and other infographics, which is insufficient for analyses such as ours. This makes it difficult to look into how the money was spent in detail.
Our analysis compares the level of funding given to researching different types of cancers with the health burden of those types of cancer. This is important as it allows us to understand who is funding what in cancer research and to understand whether research gaps may exist.
We found that the cancer types receiving the most funding were breast (US$2.73 billion, 11.2% of the total) and haematological cancer (typically referring to leukaemia, US$2.3 billion, 9.4%).