Three talks explore alternative approaches to advancing blood cancer science
When it comes to funding scientific research, Washington appears to be speaking with two voices.
The Trump administration has repeatedly proposed steep reductions in federal research spending, while Congress has pushed back against many of those cuts and continued to fund biomedical research. For fiscal year 2026, the administration sought to reduce National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding by about 40%, but Congress ultimately provided NIH with $47.5 billion in program-level funding, a 1% increase over the previous year. The final appropriation included increased funding for cancer research.
Anthony Letai, MD, PhD, director of the National Cancer Institute, addressed the mixed signals from Washington during a fireside chat at the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting, stressing that Congress controls appropriations and remains strongly supportive of cancer research.
“I want to remind you, the only budget that really counts is the budget that is approved by Congress and signed by the president,” he said at the time.
Still, the competing messages have contributed to uncertainty among scientists about what support will be available and where it will come from. With the administration again proposing reductions to NIH funding for fiscal year 2027, questions about how to sustain scientific progress are unlikely to disappear.
Due to these tensions in the system, SOHO President John DiPersio, MD, PhD, chose the theme, “Advancing care through collaborative science,” to encourage discussion about funding and to explore alternative approaches to sustain progress in cancer discovery and research.
“SOHO 2026 will explore how public-private partnerships can sustain discovery, preserve basic research, and ensure access to innovation for patients around the world,” he said.
Several sessions will look at funding from a different perspective, examining how foundations, advocacy organizations, and partnerships with industry can support research and help move promising
science forward.
Timothy Graubert, MD, brings the perspective of a clinician-scientist who has spent his career on both sides of the grant-making process. After approximately three decades in academic medicine as a physician-scientist, he became president of the Edward P. Evans Foundation in January 2025. The foundation is a private philanthropic organization focused on medical research in myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) and acute myeloid leukemia.
“I’ve seen it from both sides, both as a funded investigator doing research, applying for grants, and now as the president of this foundation,” Dr. Graubert said in an interview with SOHO Insider.
The transition has changed the scale at which he can think about advancing MDS research. Rather than concentrating on projects within his own laboratory, Dr. Graubert now considers where a private foundation can strategically invest its resources.
“I’m still engaged in the research effort in MDS by making strategic decisions at the foundation about how we might deploy our resources to best advance the field,” he said.
Historically, the Edward P. Evans Foundation has directed much of its support toward academic laboratories investigating the biology of MDS and identifying potential vulnerabilities in preclinical research. The foundation has also funded clinical investigators and their research, although Dr. Graubert said that represents a smaller portion of its funding.
Dr. Graubert plans to begin his SOHO presentation with some of the obstacles that continue to make MDS difficult to study despite advances in understanding its biology and the arrival of new treatments.
“We have made a tremendous amount of progress in the MDS field. We understand the biology much better. We have some new drugs approved, but there are some significant obstacles that remain,” he said.
He will then turn to what the Edward P. Evans Foundation has done, what it is doing now, and what new initiatives it is considering to address those obstacles.
Sairah Ahmed, MD, will chair a Meet-the-Professor session that aims to examine another source of support that can sometimes be overlooked in discussions about research funding: patient advocacy organizations.
“What is often not well understood is how advocacy groups and industry play roles together in advancing research,” Dr. Ahmed told SOHO Insider.
Organizations such as the Lymphoma Research Foundation and Blood Cancer United combine patient advocacy with direct investment in research, Dr. Ahmed said. They provide millions of dollars in grants to early-career investigators and can support projects that may struggle to find funding through more traditional mechanisms.
That can include high-risk, high-reward projects as well as research involving rare diseases and relatively small patient populations.
These projects “fill in critical gaps in knowledge but are overlooked by traditional funding mechanisms,” Dr. Ahmed said.
The role of advocacy organizations also extends beyond providing research grants. Because of their relationship with patients, the groups can bring patient priorities into decisions about which scientific questions receive attention.
“When industry alone is driving research, the priorities they put forth may not be the same priorities that are important to patients,” she said.
Advocacy organizations can push for research into underserved subtypes and rare diseases, as well as quality-of-life outcomes and long-term survivorship.
Those areas are “not really commercially attractive to industry, but they matter to patients.”
Advocacy organizations can also help connect patients with clinical trials. She pointed to the Lymphoma Research Foundation and what she informally described as a “trial concierge.” The organization can identify a study that appears appropriate for a patient and contact the participating center to ask whether the patient might be eligible before making the referral.
The process can take away some of the overwhelming sense that patients need to do everything themselves when they are first diagnosed or experience a relapse and are trying to determine what comes next. Connecting appropriate patients with studies can also help accelerate enrollment.
The organizations can contribute in other ways as well. She pointed to registries and research infrastructure that allow investigators at multiple institutions to pool data and resources that would be difficult for a single center to assemble, citing the Lymphoma Epidemiology of Outcomes Consortium, a large multicenter prospective cohort studying non-Hodgkin lymphoma, as one example.
Prof. Charles Craddock, CBE, approaches the funding question from the clinical trial side. He is examining whether academic clinical trial organizations can partner creatively with industry while creating a source of funding that can be reinvested in research.
One problem with the existing global contract research organizations (CROs), Prof. Craddock noted, is that pharmaceutical companies “often have to contract with a number of distinct CROs to deliver a complex trial,” whereas academic CROs can offer a “one-stop shop.”
“One of the other attractions of developing an academic CRO model is that this is a model that generates financial surplus,” Prof. Craddock added.
Rather than allowing that money to leave the academic research environment, he explained, the model provides a way for it to support the people and infrastructure needed to conduct additional studies.
The “financial surplus generated by the academic CRO [can] be reinvested back into research nurses, back into clinical trials, therefore creating a sustainable model.”
One example of how the approach can work is the UK organization Accelerating Clinical Trials Limited, which operates as a company limited by guarantee, generating revenue from clinical research and reinvesting its profit in trials.
In its first four years, Prof. Craddock said, the initiative attracted more than £45 million (approximately $60 million) from global pharmaceutical companies. The funding helped establish two national clinical trial networks, employ nearly 30 research nurses, and support a central staff.
The approach is also intended to preserve a role for academic investigators in the design and conduct of industry-supported studies. Academic CROs can generate “registration-standard data” while maintaining “some academic control and input,” Prof. Craddock explained.
Leah Sherwood is the Editorial Director of SOHO Insider.
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