93% of cancer disparities researchers affected by federal funding changes, report finds

Survey of 122 scientists reveals halted trials, layoffs, and uncertainty

The American Association for Cancer Research report, published alongside a survey of 122 researchers working in cancer disparities, said federal policy changes have affected nearly all respondents in the field. Researchers reported that clinical trials were halted mid-course, staff were laid off, and training programs for minority students were restructured or eliminated.

Mariana Stern, a professor of preventive medicine and urology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC who chaired the report committee, said many medical trials stopped abruptly. “Those patients suddenly didn’t receive the treatments they were getting, because the funding stopped,” Stern said.

The survey found that 59% of respondents said their lost funding came from the National Institutes of Health. A separate analysis of NIH data by the nonprofit Grant Witness counted thousands of NIH grant terminations across 2025, following an executive order in January 2025 that directed agencies to end what it called “radical” and “wasteful” DEI research.

Heather Pierce, senior director for science policy at the Association of American Medical Colleges, said the scale of the cancellations was unprecedented. “Termination was reserved as a very extreme remedy,” Pierce said. She described it as a mass termination “for simply not moving forward priorities of a new administration.”

Some terminated NIH grants were restored after court challenges, but fewer new grants from the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities have been awarded this year compared with previous years, according to the report. Pierce also noted a “continued slowdown this year” in grant making and renewals.

Researchers described the personal impact. Scarlett Lin Gomez, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, said her Greater Bay Area Cancer Registry, funded by NCI for 53 consecutive years, received a cut “completely unprecedented.” She said she had to let go of about seven full-time employees last year and expects to release five or six more this year. “It literally keeps me up at night — the impacts on individuals in my lab,” Gomez said.

Dr. Robert Winn, cancer center director at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Pennsylvania and whose work was discussed in the report, said the disruption is forcing researchers to be “creative to keep things going.” He warned that a prolonged funding slowdown would harm patient outcomes. “If we take our foot off the pedal of disparities research, there will be more Americans — in rural communities and others not near [centers of excellence] — who will not do well,” Winn said.

Stern said she had to reword many of her funding requests and in some cases change the focus of her projects to comply with the executive orders. She had previously received federal money for training and career development programs aimed at increasing the number of racial and ethnic minority students entering medical school and research careers. “We are no longer allowed to have programs that target exclusively racial and ethnic minorities,” Stern said.

The report notes that disparities research has helped narrow gaps. The Black-white cancer death gap, for example, dropped from about 34% higher in the 1990s to about 9% higher today. Still, significant gaps remain: rural Americans are 18% more likely to die from cancer overall, and Black women are 35% more likely to die from breast cancer than white women.

A 2023 study in JAMA estimated that medical disparities cost American society about $451 billion annually in medical costs and lost productivity.

“A lot of these disparities can be avoidable,” Gomez said. Cancer disparities research, she added, “informs not only the gaps in outcomes and care among everyone in the U.S. but also the effect of individual and biological differences.”

In response to questions about the cuts, the NIH said in a statement that the NCI “identifies cancer disparity research as a priority and recognizes that advancements in the field generate knowledge benefiting all patients across the cancer continuum.”