The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) says that declining budgets at the National Institutes of Health a crisis standing in the way of bringing cancer research to patient’s lives.

For the past ten years, NIH budgets have been essentially flat.  Factoring in rising research costs, flat funding means a loss of nearly $6 billion dollars in purchasing power.

AACR is calling on its members and the advocacy community to work even harder with Congress to invest in medical research.  The AACR board of directors said,

Therefore, the AACR announced this morning that it plans to redouble its efforts to engage with Congress to make research funding a higher national priority, raise public awareness of the importance of continued investment in cancer research, and call on its 34,000 members and broader advocacy community constituencies to join together to help better explain and illustrate the value of cancer research and biomedical science to the economic health and well-being of this nation.

AACR President Judy E. Garber, MD, MPH said,

We already see the effects on our most precious resource, young investigators. This is potentially disastrous, as we are relying on them to ensure the continuing pipeline of new discoveries that will have ever greater impact on the welfare of patients and the public health.

AACR is holding its 2012 annual meeting in Chicago this week – Accelerating Science: Concept to Clinic.

Watch Nancy Roach tell AACR members and advocates how they can join the effort for cancer research funding.

Speaking at the 2011 annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, Nancy said,

If public funding for biomedical research matters to you, get involved.

Nancy represented the voice of advocates in an AACR discussion of The Outlook for Cancer Research Funding in the Coming Years: The Importance of Advocacy and Government Relations.

She was joined by former Illinois Congressman John Edward Porter, Shannon K. Bell from the NCI Office of Advocacy Relations, and Jon G. Retzlaff who is the managing director of Science Policy and Government Affairs for AACR.

You can also hear John Edward Porter and Shannon Bell on the AACR website.

Jon Chung PhD

The 2011 Fight Colorectal Cancer-AACR Fellowship, in memory of Lisa Dubow, has been awarded to Jon H. Chung, PhD  from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

His proposed research is Hedgehog Pathway Targeted Therapeutics for Metastatic Colorectal Cancer.

With the award, Dr. Chung will study alternatives to the traditional Hedgehog signaling pathway in colon cancer cells.  He will explore crosstalk within the cell between the Hedgehog and Wnt pathways and screen for drugs that block both pathways at the same time, potentially stopping cancer development. Read the rest of this entry »

Too many people avoid colonoscopy.  Too invasive, they say.  Too scary, too risky.

There may be an answer for them in an improved stool test that looks for DNA that is changed in both colorectal cancer and some precancerous polyps.

Of course, if the stool test identifies possible polyps or cancer, a colonoscopy is critical to evaluate the findings and remove polyps.

The test that looks for methylated DNA in human feces, found 85 percent of cancers and 64 percent of large adenomas.  There were few false positives.  Only one in ten follow-up colonoscopies didn’t confirm cancer or adenomas. Read the rest of this entry »

Patients, care partners, survivors, advocates . . . everyone.  It’s Our Time!

Watch a video about the promise of cancer research — and its urgency — from the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR).