Grant funding for scientists at public and private institutions is as competitive and selective as it has ever been. An article in Science magazine earlier this year reported that grant success rates from the National Institutes of Health fell to their lowest mark ever in 2011 to 18 percent overall, down from 30 percent a mere decade ago. Interestingly, overall grant applications increased, probably in no small part to burgeoning PhD programs issuing more degrees than ever before. Additionally, and especially after the 2008 global financial collapse, state and federal support at universities is collapsing, leaving many labs and principal investigators unable to support their staff and research itineraries. Scientific American proclaimed this broken funding system nothing short of a crisis. With more scientists and newly minted PhDs applying for first-time grants, and with less money to be doled out, scientists are spending too much time raising cash instead of doing experiments.

Nowhere is this truer than in the wide-ranging, multidisciplinary field of cancer research. Since President Richard Nixon declared a ‘War on Cancer’ in 1971, billions have been spent on research and medical advances in the hope for an eventual cure. And in many ways, it has paid off, with cancer innovation currently enjoying a Golden Era of tailored, targeted and effective therapies towards individual cancers. Each week brings new promise for trailblazing advances, even as certain cancers continue to present daunting obstacles and complexity.

Nevertheless, the overall death rate for cancer patients is worrisomely unchanged in the 40 years since Nixon’s bold declaration, and many cancer researchers blame an inadequate and misguided funding system that rewards safe, anodyne research at the expense of risk-taking and bold initiatives, the very ones that lead to advances. The grant system has evolved into a “jobs program” that keeps certain research laboratories going year after year. As such, researchers become hesitant to apply for funding for more high-risk projects, and instead keep cycling money towards cautious work with much lower propensity for a high-reward outcome. Moreover, internal squabbling within the cancer community also arises about where to invest the cancer funding that does come through. The most common cancers? The most deadly? Interestingly, a recent study in the RAND Journal of Economics found that biologists who were given more time and latitude in their research, which included the freedom to fail, indeed produced more duds but also produced more hit papers.

To overcome this challenge, more and more cancer researchers are partnering with subsidiaries and collaborations in the private industry sector. More cutting-edge cancer research is gaining support from industry, according to new findings from the Fox Chase Cancer Center. Approximately 48 percent of all papers accepted at this year’s annual American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting had at least one author with ties to industry, up from 39 percent in 2006. The benefit of these affiliations is obvious and immediate: money. With financial freedom in the laboratory comes the academic freedom to devote resources towards discovery. Despite having a discovery basis in academic labs, two revolutionary cancer cures of the last fifteen years, Herceptin and Gleevec, would not have been brought to market (or saved millions of lives) were it not for industry funding. Moreover, high profile research and papers that received higher scores from their peers was more likely to come from researchers with industry relationships.

Nevertheless, some scientists are slightly less enthused by these developments, calling attention to the potential drawback that conflicts of interest might present. "If we're going to have relationships with industry, we're going to have to find ways to monitor and manage these relationships, to ensure they don't end up biasing any results,” a leading cancer researcher urged. The scientific method of investigation and peer review must not be circumvented in order to prematurely develop a promising drug or treatment, no matter the pressure from industry beneficiaries. Likewise, cancer patients should not hesitate to ask their physicians about ties to industry, and to ensure that the treatment they are receiving is really what is ideal for their illness rather than profitable for a pharmaceutical company.

The nature of science research is heading towards a more collaborative sphere each decade. Within universities and research centers, disciplines and departments once separated physically on campus and in their courses of study are working together on innovative biotechnology and information solutions for the 21st Century. This model is now flowing out towards the industrial sector, where professors are both monetizing their inventions to bring them to the marketplace more rapidly and relying on the revenue of large companies to further fund even more cutting-edge research. With many governments and traditional sources of laboratory funding in recession, such partnerships could prove to be a robust source of freedom for labs to take risks in their research and benefits to society when those risks pay off with unlikely cures. Concurrently, caution must be exercised in making sure that industry’s fiduciary generosity does not present conflicts of interest for professors, whose priority is to academic discovery, and for physicians, whose priority is the best care possible for their patients.