Senate likely to approve cancer funding

WASHINGTON, June 4 (UPI) -- A Senate appropriations subcommittee appears ready to approve President Bush's request for increased funding for cancer research in fiscal year 2003.

At a hearing on cancer research Tuesday held by the subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education, subcommittee Chairman Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, said, "With this year's appropriation, we will have doubled funding for cancer research" from what it was five years ago.

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., ranking member of the committee and a survivor of brain cancer, also voiced support for the increased funding. He noted his reply to scientists who ask him what Congress will do now that they have doubled cancer research funding is, "Triple it."

Bush's budget allots $5.6 billion for cancer research, a 13 percent increase from last year's level, of Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson testified. The money will be funneled through the National Institutes of Health. The bulk of it, $4.7 billion, will go to the National Cancer Institute.

It is important to continue ample funding for cancer research because "we're on the cusp of having a lot of breakthroughs" in treatments for the disease, Thompson said.

Historically, funding for cancer has had strong bipartisan support, so the budget the president has requested is likely to go through, Wendy Selig, managing director for federal government relations at the American Cancer Society, told United Press International.

However, "nothing is a given" and the funding could be reduced, she said.

Selig noted Bush, whose sister died from leukemia at 3, has "made a major commitment to cancer research" exceeding that made by recent administrations. Bush's parents serve as co-chairs of the National Dialogue on Cancer, an organization that seeks to bring together leaders of national cancer organizations, governmental agencies and other experts to foster and support efforts to combat cancer.

The American Cancer Society was advocating for $5.69 billion to be earmarked for cancer research, so the administration's number comes close to that goal.

More than 1.2 million Americans will be diagnosed with cancer this year and about 550,000 will die from the disease, Thompson noted.

Much of the funding will go to basic research to uncover the mechanisms of cancer and search for new ways to treat the disease, but more emphasis needs to be placed on increasing enrollment in clinical trials -- in which promising new treatments are tested in people, testified Ronald Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute.

There is not enough enrollment in these trials, Harkin said, adding that only 3 percent of adults with cancer are in clinical trials.

"We should be looking for ways to improve this," Thompson said. But, he noted, funding clinical trials takes money away from basic research, so the issue should be reviewed by officials at the National Cancer Institute.