NIH budget cuts may slow personalized cancer drugs

Development of personalized cancer treatments tailored to the molecular makeup of individual tumors may be jeopardized by little-changed or reduced U.S. funding for biomedical research, according to a new report.The American Association for Cancer Research instead recommends an 8.6 percent increase in the National Institutes of Health fiscal 2012 budget, to $33.3 billion. The Philadelphia-based group, the world’s largest cancer research organization, is responding to a $322 million cut to the NIH this year.“With the entire focus in D.C. on deficit reduction, we feel it’s time to put a document out there that shows the value of cancer and biomedical research and the value of that investment,” said Jon Retzlaff, the group’s managing director of science policy and government affairs, by phone.Retzlaff’s group is lobbying Congress this week as a 12- member congressional committee debates how to trim the U.S. budget deficit. The budget for NIH, the biggest public spender on bioscience, stands at about $30.7 billion.“It’s the first time in as long as many people can remember that the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute’s budgets have declined,” Retzlaff said.The group's report details how treatment has moved from “one-size-fits-all cancer care” to customized cures where the molecular makeup of the patient and the tumor dictate the strategy.Medicines that had their roots in public-sector research include Imatinib, currently marketed by Swiss drugmaker Novartis AG (NOVN) as Gleevec. The leukemia drug has helped limit the disease to a chronic condition with a five-year survival of 95 percent, said Elizabeth Blackburn, professor of biology and physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, and the association’s immediate past president.The drug represents the future of more targeted cancer therapies, in contrast to chemotherapy drugs which affect all cells, the report said. There are now 32 FDA-approved drugs that target tumor cells with fewer side effects.“We finally invested enough in the infrastructure to see an accelerating pace of breakthroughs,” Judy Garber, association president and director of the Center for Cancer Genetics and Prevention at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, said in a phone interview.Garber cited new drugs approved this year to treat melanoma, including Roche Holding AG (ROG)’s Zelboraf.Such drugs are “the tip of the iceberg,” she said. “After we’ve finally gotten to this point, do we say, ‘We’ve got these two, that’s enough?’ We’d be foolish to miss the opportunity we now have.”