Who Funds Cancer Research? A Growing Divide in Clinical Trials

Dr Maurie Markman highlights the growing divide between industry-sponsored and federally funded cancer trials and its impact on research and patients.
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/who-funds-cancer-research-growing-divide-clinical-trials-2025a10007fb?src=soc_yt

-- TRANSCRIPT --
Hello. I'm Dr Maurie Markman, from City of Hope. I want to briefly discuss a somewhat straightforward but very provocative report, which leads to the potential for greater discussion at another time. The paper is “Patient Enrollment to Industry-Sponsored Versus Federally-Sponsored Cancer Clinical Trials,” reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

These investigators looked at a total of 26,000 cancer-related studies conducted from 2008 to 2022. They specifically look at the earlier period, 2008-2012, vs the latest period, 2018-2022, to observe the ratio of industry-sponsored to federally funded or sponsored studies.

What they found was striking. The ratio of industry-sponsored to federally sponsored patient accruals in the earlier period was 4.8, so 4.8 times higher in industry compared to federal. By 2018-2022, that ratio had increased to 9.6, so almost 10 times the number of patients in industry vs federally funded trials. That was for adults.

For children, that ratio went from 0.7, meaning the majority were on federally funded studies in the early period, to 2.3, meaning now there were twice as many patients on industry-sponsored studies compared to federally funded studies.

Although that's the ratio, if you actually look at the numbers in federally sponsored studies — even though much of our research is being done, there's much more understanding of cancer, and cancer incidence has gone up — federal funding accrual was absolutely flat during this period of time.

Obviously, this is something to discuss in terms of implications. One can suggest, and this is a positive, that the industry is very interested in coming up with new strategies, whether it's drugs or devices, and putting their money on this to do these trials. That is good and that's certainly good for society.

I would also suggest that, although that's true, industry is doing studies for a particular reason, and appropriately so, which is to potentially come up with a new product on the market or a new indication. Industry is less focused on — because that's not what they're in business to do — asking some pragmatic questions that have no products associated with them but may be very meaningful for cancer prevention, screening, comparing one strategy to another, or cost-effectiveness.

Transcript in its entirety can be found by clicking here:
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/who-funds-cancer-research-growing-divide-clinical-trials-2025a10007fb?src=soc_yt