A Cancer Research Agenda for the Nation, and for SWOG

Among academic journals, none has a higher journal impact factor than CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, published by the American Cancer Society.

And the article most widely cited year after year, from this most widely cited journal, is its annual January report on the burden of cancer in the United States. That summary aggregates and analyzes data from multiple sources to produce a comprehensive national portrait of cancer, detailing incidence, mortality, demographics, and more, broken out by cancer and disease site. 

Each year, CA invites one or more of the nation’s preeminent oncologists to contribute a commentary to appear alongside this highly influential paper. 

This year’s “Cancer statistics, 2026” report was just published, and the accompanying commentary is penned by two preeminent oncologists – SWOG Cancer Research Network’s incoming group chairs, Drs. Primo N. Lara, Jr., and Dawn L. Hershman. In the spirit of full disclosure, I should say SWOG’s vice-chair for membership and accrual, Dr. Don Dizon, is CA editor-in-chief.

As you might expect, a unifying theme in the Hershman/Lara piece “Cancer statistics, 2026: Charting a course for a national cancer research agenda” is the role of federally funded research in continuing the gains and tackling the challenges portrayed in the 2026 CA report.

They also discuss the interlocking contributions of several of the key components of the federal research support infrastructure, including the NCI’s Cancer Centers Program, the National Clinical Trials Network (NCTN), and the NCI Community Oncology Research Program (NCORP). 

In addition to citing one of my favorite SWOG papers from recent years, which found that NCTN cooperative group treatment trial results since 1980 have saved 14.2 million life-years for Americans – at a federal investment of about $300 per life-year saved – they note that same study also projected that, by 2030, gains from these trials would amount to 24.1 million life-years saved.

As Congress debates appropriate funding levels for the National Institutes of Health (and the strong bipartisan support seen recently for robust NIH funding is most encouraging), the perspective Drs. Lara and Hershman provide on the latest statistical portrait of cancer in the U.S. is highly enlightening and will, I hope, be widely read. It’s a vital contribution to our current national dialogue on the role of public funding for biomedical research overall.

If you haven’t read their commentary yet, please do. You can find it online here – open access, no paywall.

To bring it back home, in framing the role of federal support in continuing the encouraging trends detailed in the CA cancer statistics report, our incoming chairs also give us a glimpse of SWOG’s future.
 

Best of SWOG, Wednesday, January 28th, 2-3 ET / 11-12 PT
Our next Best of SWOG webinar is next week! Click here to learn more about this one-hour showcase of SWOG research. 
And register now!