The Disease Olympics

In August of last year, molecular biologist Keith Yamamoto wrote a letter of concern to the chairs of the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce and several other congressional leaders. The target of his ire was the Pancreatic Cancer Research and Education Act, which, if passed as originally conceived, would have directed the federal government to spend $888 million over five years on research and awareness campaigns focused solely on this one type of cancer—an amount far exceeding the $112 million currently devoted by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to the disease. The bill, the result of a long lobbying effort by the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PCAN), a national advocacy organization, was supported by more than half of the members of Congress and was expected to succeed in both the House and the Senate.Yamamoto, vice chancellor for research at the University of California–San Francisco (UCSF), worried about the bill’s sweeping provisions. Most notably, he took objection to the creation of a coordinating committee whose charge was to write a five-year strategic plan, including budgetary requirements, for pancreatic cancer research at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the oldest and best funded of the 27 institutes and centers that comprise the NIH. Under the proposed bill, the committee would include 13 members, mostly pancreatic cancer scientists along with a patient advocate and one member from the NCI. The group would be authorized to create a new peer-review system for pancreatic cancer grants that would operate independently of established peer-review committees at the NCI. And if the NCI chose not to follow any of the committee’s recommendations, it would have to explain why in an annual report to Congress.“Ominously, [the bill] is intended to set a precedent, inviting other groups to similarly bypass NCI and NIH authority,” Yamamoto wrote on behalf of a basic-research advocacy group called the Coalition for the Life Sciences. Yamamoto noted that the bill would also have far-reaching scientific consequences. “It would isolate... pancreatic cancer research from remarkable discoveries being made in other cancers and across the biomedical research landscape” and thus “create a separation, and motivate further separation, at exactly the wrong time,” he wrote.Read more at...Nature Medicine, March 2013.