An Earmark in the Making: NCI Urged to Boost Gastric Cancer Funding

A group of members of both chambers of Congress is urging NCI to increase funding for research in gastric cancers—the latest in a string of advocacy initiatives to carve out fiscal support for specific diseases.

“Deadly gastric cancer is on the rise in young people,” reads a Nov. 26 letter from five members of the Senate. “Gastric cancer receives by far the lowest amount of research funding for the common cancers at NCI, at only $12 million in 2012. That amounts to only 0.4 percent of the entire NCI FY 2012 budget for common cancer research.”

The letter, addressed to NCI Director Harold Varmus, is a response to Varmus’s reply to an earlier letter from members of the House of Representatives.

“We ask you to increase the federal research for stomach cancer in order to stem these dangerous trends,” the Senate letter states.

The letter from the senators, as well as the July 22 letter from 39 House members, was the result of lobbying efforts by Debbie’s Dream Foundation, an advocacy group focused on stomach cancer founded in 2009.

“We met with a number of representatives and we got tremendous interest from the members of Congress who talked to their constituents who are facing this,” DDF Advocacy Committee Chair Kristin Fitzgerald said to The Cancer Letter. “We particularly want to advocate that stomach cancer is rising in young people—it had primarily been a disease of older people in the past, but that trend is really changing.”

The Senate letter was signed by: Sens. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii).

Jon Retzlaff, managing director of science policy and government affairs at the American Association for Cancer Research, said earmarking for specific diseases is harmful to research.

“Because of the broad scope of the AACR, we are very concerned about all of the more than 200 different types of cancer,” Retzlaff said to The Cancer Letter. “In fact, in 2013, more than 580,350 Americans will die from one of these more than 200 types of cancer.

“Therefore, while we can certainly understand and appreciate the interest and need for advocacy groups to draw attention to their particular disease, we also don’t believe earmarking for one particular type of cancer is advisable, especially when so much of the funding from NIH and NCI is in vital discovery research, which benefits all diseases.