ASCO（美国临床肿瘤学会）年会在举行的全体会议上报告了四组三期临床试验的结果，提供了对乳腺癌、前列腺癌及结肠直肠癌的新看法，这些实验都部分得到了NIH的资助。

ASCO主席Clifford Hudis表示资助的钱打了水漂，他在一个简介中强调联邦资助的实验是设计用来回答对于患者至关重要的问题的，诸如比较药效的研究、老药新用以及提高生命质量，这些研究往往是产业界较少关注的方面。但是这个维持实验运行的系统并不像我们想象的那样运行，尽管2014年NCI（国家癌症研究所）的Cooperative Group Program计划已经开始实施，但是该计划目前还只是改进了系统，表面上看，该系统运行更有效了，尽管这是朝好的方向发展，但实际进展太少其实，今天报道的四组研究都在这个系统改进前就已经开展了数年的工作了。目前的结果也仅仅是“年复一年的承诺要将这些试验做完”而已。Hudis强调，当下面临的难题是，“未来谁来计划、实施、完成这些实验”，而答案仍未知。

Clifford Hudis表示，实际上联邦对研究的资助正在逐步减少，比如，2008年的ASCO会议上，提交并被接收的摘要中，575份受联邦资助，而今年仅有169份。

作者：汤森路透RandyOsborne

编译者：生命科学研究快报 江洪波

英文原文：

ASCO 2014: Fed funding’s fruits appear just as money is going away;

By Randy Osborne, Staff Writer

CHICAGO – Data from four phase III trials were slated to roll out during the afternoon plenary session of the 50th annual meeting of American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), providing new insights into breast, prostate and colorectal cancers and each funded at least in part by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

That money is going away, said ASCO president Clifford Hudis in a briefing, who noted that federally funded trials are “designed often to answer questions that are critically important to patients, things like comparative effectiveness research, new indications for older generic drugs, and improvement in quality of life. These are often studies that industry is less interested in performing.”

But the system that kept those experiments alive “really does not exist as we [knew] it,” Hudis said, since NCI’s Cooperative Group Program has evolved in 2014. “It is now a streamlined, ostensibly more efficient system, and that’s to the good, but it also seems to be much, much smaller,” he said. “The studies being presented today began years before this streamlining.”

Results, Hudis said, came only “because of a longstanding, year-after-year commitment to getting them done. The question we are facing now is, ‘Who is going to plan, launch and complete these kinds of trials into the future?’ The answer, honestly, remains to be seen.”

ASCO already has turned up a “real, and we think disturbing bit of evidence” of the steadily dwindling cash. Among the abstracts submitted and accepted at the 2008 meeting, 575 involved federally funded experiments. “We are at 169 this year,” Hudis said.