The outlook for adequate funding for federal health agencies has become more dire. In July, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) announced it is reducing the number of grant applications it will award for the remaining 2 months of fiscal year 2025 (FY2025), from 9% down to 4%.1 The result is that only 1 in 25 applicants will receive funding from the agency, which could extend into the FY2026 budget year starting on October 1 unless Congress prevents the Trump administration’s policy requiring the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to fund multiyear grants with a single, upfront lump sum, rather than year by year, from going into effect.1
And, there appears to be movement in that direction. On July 31, 2025, the U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations approved an FY2026 appropriations bill that not only includes modest increases for the NIH and federal cancer research funding for the NCI, it also has language blocking the administration from reducing the number of NIH grants in FY2026.2 The Senate spending bill rejects the President’s request to cut the NIH’s budget by 40% and instead calls for $48.7 billion for the NIH, an increase of $400 million over FY2025 levels, and nearly $7.4 billion for the NCI, an increase of $150 million.2
Although the bill faces stiff challenges of passing by the full Senate and the House of Representatives, and finally being signed into law by President Trump, it illustrates strong bipartisan support to fund federal health agencies and cancer research. However, that may not be enough to stem the damage already done to the scientific community relying on consistent federal funding for its research.
According to a recent poll of 1,200 scientists in the United States conducted by Nature, 75% reported they are considering leaving the country following massive cuts to scientific programs funded by the NCI by the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency. Concern about future job prospects was most pronounced among early-career researchers. For example, of the 690 postgraduate researchers who responded to the poll, 548 reported they were considering leaving the country, and more than 250 of the 340 PhD students surveyed agreed.3 In some instances, these early-career researchers have already made the decision to leave the country for work elsewhere.
“We have young researchers in our department and cancer center who I collaborate with who are leaving the United States or have already left because of funding cuts to our medical center,” said Elizabeth M. Jaffee, MD, FAACR, FACP, FAAAS, FAIO, Deputy Director for Translational Research at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center; Dana and Albert “Cubby” Broccoli Professor of Oncology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; and Co-Director, Gastrointestinal Cancers Program at Johns Hopkins Medicine. “One researcher is going back to Europe, and one is going to Canada. They are some of our most promising next-generation future leaders we are losing to other countries because of the disruptive and destructive policies coming from the Trump administration.”
Elizabeth M. Jaffee, MD, FAACR, FACP, FAAAS, FAIO
Internationally renowned for her research in the development of immune-based approaches that overcome immune tolerance to cancers, especially pancreatic cancer, Dr. Jaffee was appointed Co-Chair of the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative Blue Ribbon Panel, first established in 2016 and again in 2022 by then President Joe Biden. She was also named Chair of former President Biden’s Cancer Panel, serving as an expert adviser on how to reach the goal of reducing the cancer death rate by half within 25 years and improving the lives of cancer survivors. Furthermore, Dr. Jaffee is past Chair of the NCI’s National Cancer Advisory Board, the first woman to hold that position.
In this wide-ranging interview with The ASCO Post, Dr. Jaffee discussed her potentially breakthrough research in pancreatic cancer recurrence and prevention in high-risk individuals, how federal budget cuts are impacting her cancer research, the impending diminishment of American dominance in the field of medical science, and the importance of cancer researchers becoming more effective public communicators.
Understanding How Pancreatic Cancer Develops and Metastasizes
Please talk about the progress you are making in potentially more effective treatments of pancreatic cancer, reducing the risk for disease recurrence, and preventing the cancer in high-risk individuals.
We are at a critical time in pancreatic cancer research—and in other life-threatening diseases, too. We are finally starting to understand how pancreatic cancer develops and progresses. We are beginning to understand the underlying pathways and the fibroblast inflammatory response, which plays a significant role in tumor progression. These fibroblasts are potential targets for therapeutic intervention. This is knowledge we’ve gained because of the investments made in the Cancer Moonshot, which have enabled us to sequence small pieces of pancreatic tumors and see how the different types of cells interact in the microenvironment depending on how they are responding to treatment.
My research has focused on the development of cancer vaccines that induce healthy T cells to recognize and kill cancer cells. The reason why some cancers do not respond to an anti–PD-1 therapy is because patients might have exhausted or otherwise compromised T cells, reducing their ability to effectively target and destroy cancer cells. We’ve developed a whole tumor cell vaccine called GVAX—a granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor–secreting vaccine that activates T-cell immunity against tumor-associated antigens—and added an anti–PD-1 antibody, nivolumab, and an anti-CD137 agonist antibody called urelumab as a potential treatment of pancreatic cancer.
Our results from a small clinical trial showed that the triple combination treatment was effective in achieving pathologic regression in the tumor after one dose given 2 weeks prior to surgery.4 When we see a pathologic response after surgery, we continue the therapy. We are seeing some real long-term delays in disease recurrence in these patients. In the patients who did experience a recurrence, we are beginning to understand why and are developing a more effective way of administering this treatment. We have now initiated a much larger study and are enrolling patients pretty quickly.
We are hoping to show that this triple combination treatment will prevent pancreatic cancer from recurring in a good percentage of patients and that these pathologic responses may correlate with long-term disease remission. I believe we are finally getting a hold of how to turn these difficult cancers into ones that respond to the immune system. Of note, our next-generation vaccine is one that is targeting the most common oncogene in pancreatic cancer, the mutated KRAS gene, which is the common driver in about 90% of patients with this cancer.
In addition, we are taking this vaccine into high-risk populations to see whether we can prevent pancreatic cancer from developing. We’ve already completed a study with 20 high-risk patients who have a genetic predisposition or a family history of pancreatic cancer. We’ve studied their immune responses to the vaccine, and, so far, no patient has developed the cancer.
Another study we’ve opened is with patients who have pancreatic cysts that can be measured on an imaging scan. We can tell whether these cysts are likely to transform into cancer within 6 months. We vaccinate patients with the GVAX vaccine and then surgically remove the cysts. We’ve performed the treatment on three patients and have studied the inflammatory response the vaccine is inducing, and it looks like the treatment is having an effect on preventing the transformation to cancer. It’s very exciting because, right now, the only alternative is to remove the pancreas, which is not a good thing.
Adding Tariff Fees to the Cost of Doing Research
An analysis by TheNew York Times of federal funding cuts to the NIH and NCI from January through April 2025 found that at the NIH alone, nearly 1,400 awards have been ended, and more than 1,000 additional projects have experienced funding delays. In addition, the NIH has awarded $1.6 billion less in grants compared with the same period a year ago, affecting research in cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and substance use, among other serious health conditions.5
How have these budget and grant reductions affected your research? Have you lost researchers because of funding cuts?
Our cancer research funding from the NCI has not been reduced by much so far, but we are having effects from the federal funding cuts in delays in receiving the funding and in the grant review process. So, we don’t know yet whether the grants we’ve submitted will be approved. One student in my group who had received a grant in diversity, equity, and inclusion cancer research had her grant cut, which isn’t encouraging to a graduate student who had been considering staying in scientific research and possibly returning to her poor community in Michigan to provide care for patients with cancer.
We also now have an official hiring freeze at my institution because of anticipated additional funding cuts, and we can’t hire research staff. We can no longer travel to meetings unless we are invited to participate in the conference, which is discouraging for researchers who want to learn from their peers and share research data. It also is discouraging for trainees who look forward to meeting experts from around the country and the world as well as learning from them.
My laboratory has been affected by the Department of Defense cuts to indirect cost reimbursements for research grants. We need to find additional funds to support the supplementary activities associated with our research to complete the work.
Furthermore, my research has been affected by the tariffs imposed on drugs coming from outside the country. For example, one of our cancer vaccines is made in Europe, because there is no American manufacturer that will make the vaccine for a small lab like ours at a reasonable price. And before we could get the release of the vaccine, which cost $130,000, at the border, I had to pay an additional $13,000 in tariff fees. I had to quickly find this money, and, in the meantime, the vaccine sat for a week at the border. We were fortunate that the effectiveness of the vaccine was not compromised, and we were able to proceed in the treatment of patients with pancreatic cancer.
So, we are being hit with extra costs of doing our research by tariffs, and it’s likely we will also soon see the effects of budget cuts. Two of my NCI grants are ending in 2026. With the announcement that the NCI is shrinking its share of grant applications, the percent of grants funded is expected to drop from 9% to 4%. Therefore, it’s unlikely I will be able to get these grants renewed, which is especially disappointing, since we are beginning to see such progress in pancreatic research.
Impact of Research Cuts on Patients
President Trump’s FY2026 budget proposal calls for the reduction of NIH’s budget to $27.5 billion from $48 billion, a nearly 40% drop, which would lead to approximately 10,000 fewer new and continuing research grants in 2026 compared with 2025 paylines as well as the reorganization of the agency’s 27 institutes and centers into just 8 institutes.6 How will these changes to the federal health agencies impact medical research in both the near and far term, and what potential effect will this have on patients with cancer?
We’re already starting to see ramifications of these proposed changes to the NIH. Most of the questions I’m getting from my trainees and early-career faculty center on how they should proceed with their professional plans. Should they stay in the United States or look for jobs outside the country? So, the cutbacks are already hitting a whole generation that is poised to replace older scientists.
In terms of funding cuts and the impact on patients, if I can’t launch or continue my clinical trials, what can I say to patients with pancreatic cancer who want to enroll in these studies to have access to these most promising experimental therapies? I don’t know what to say. I have no answer for them when they ask if we will be here for them in the future, other than we are doing our best to provide ongoing care and we care about them, but I cannot guarantee these trials will be open in the future.
It’s disheartening and tragic to see how we are losing our dominance in cancer research to other countries, including China. If you look at the state of scientific research before World War II, Germany was the global leader, particularly in the fields of physics and chemistry, producing more Nobel laureates in scientific fields than any other country. In fact, Johns Hopkins University, which is the model for pioneering work in cancer research, is based on the German university model of the 1920s, which emphasized specialized training and research.
What the Trump administration has done in just a few months is eradicate our incredible scientific contribution to the world. When I talk with our industry partners, they say they are not going to test new drugs in the United States first because of reduced NIH funding to universities, which feed early-stage discoveries into biotech and pharmaceutical pipelines. They are now looking to do business in Europe and China instead, so our whole engine of innovation, drug discovery, and drug approval system is being disrupted, and it may not recover for generations.
Scientific Brain Drain
How will reductions in funding and grant terminations at the NCI affect future progress in cancer research? Will all future advances be coming from places outside the United States?
Dismantling research and development at universities will hurt American innovation in cancer research and in other life-threatening diseases. We are already seeing a brain drain in researchers, especially among early-career scientists, who are actively being recruited by countries such as South Korea, Ireland, Denmark, France, Spain, Germany, Canada, and Australia among others.
We’re all going to have to consider opportunities elsewhere, because the stress here is becoming untenable. It’s hard to be productive when you are feeling depressed and stressed about the diminishment of science in this country. I recently led a review in Germany of the cancer research happening there, and all the researchers there are happy and excited about their work. That’s no longer the environment we are working in here.
What I am telling my staff who have received NCI grants and are currently doing okay is to keep working, because there is going to be such a contraction in the research workforce that there will be opportunities if funding is restored soon. I say, let’s think about how we can do things better and how we can become more efficient and impactful in our research should the funding be restored.
I can’t exactly predict how the federal funding cuts will impact research for specific diseases, but we know research is going to stop in some areas; when you go to a 4% payline and industry is leaving to do business in other countries, how will we make up the difference in the loss of federal grants? The best people in research are leaving federal health agencies and academic universities, and they’re not likely to come back and feel secure, because there is no longer trust in the government to support their efforts.
Communicating With the Public
I read an Op-Ed you coauthored in The Cancer Letter in which you said scientists need to do a better job of communicating the complex nature of cancer, the importance of maintaining a sustainable federal budget to continue to advance progress in the disease, and how public investment in cancer research benefits all Americans.7 Please talk about how oncologists and researchers can become more effective communicators with the public about their work?
I’ve been talking to various oncology organizations about the need to give courses on how cancer researchers can become better communicators with the public about their work to build trust and combat misinformation and distrust in science. We give courses in grant writing and in other aspects of our profession. We should be able to develop training courses in better ways to communicate science to the public. We need to be clearer about why government investments in cancer research are so important and why it may sometimes take decades to reap the rewards.
I think the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated distrust in science, and it’s time to close the gap in the public’s understanding of how scientific discoveries can positively impact their lives. We have to improve our efforts to communicate science to the public, balancing what we know and what we can reasonably predict will happen in the future with what science can and cannot achieve. We also need to become better listeners, so we can better understand the public’s concerns. It’s the only way we will begin to regain societal trust in science.
DISCLOSURE: Dr. Jaffee has received funding from AbMeta Therapeutics and Adventris Pharmaceuticals; personal fees from Dragonfly Therapeutics, Neuvogen, STIMIT TX, Mestag Therapeutics, Candel Therapeutics, and HDT Bio; and grants from the Lustgarten Foundation, Genentech, BMS, NeoTx, and Break Through Cancer (she also serves as a consultant to the organization). In addition, Adventris Pharmaceuticals has licensed a technology described in a study in this story from Johns Hopkins University. As a result of that agreement, Dr. Jaffee and Johns Hopkins University are entitled to royalty distributions related to this technology. This arrangement has been reviewed and approved by Johns Hopkins University in accordance with its conflict-of-interest policies.
REFERENCES
1. Chen A, Molteni M, Oza A: NIH is shrinking the number of research projects it funds due to a new Trump policy. STAT, July 29, 2025. Available at www.statnews.com/2025/07/29/nih-cancer-institute-shrink-number-of-funded-research-grants/. Accessed August 13, 2025.
2. Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill, 2026; S. 2587. July 31, 2025. Available at www.appropriations.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/fy26_lhhs_senate_report.pdf. Accessed August 13, 2025.
3. Witze A: Nature 640:298-299, 2025.
4. Heumann T, et al: Nat Commun 14:3650, 2023.
5. Hwang I, Huang J, Anthes E, et al: The disappearing funds for chronic diseases. The New York Times, June 4, 2025. Available at nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/04/health/trump-cuts-nih-grants-research.html. Accessed August 13, 2025.
6. Science News Staff: Trump’s proposed budget details drastic cuts to biomedical research and global health. Science, June 2, 2025. Available at www.science.org/content/article/trump-s-proposed-budget-details-dramatic-cuts-biomedical-research-and-global-health. Accessed August 13, 2025.
7. Weiner GJ, Jaffee EM: As cancer scientists, we must change how we engage with the public on the impact of NIH cuts. The Cancer Letter, July 3, 2025. Available at https://cancerletter.com/guest-editorial/20250703_2/. Accessed August 13, 2025.
