Cancer research is not correlated with driver gene mutation burdens.

Abstract

Background: Cancer research is pursued with the goal of positively impacting patients with cancer. Decisions regarding how to allocate research funds reflect a complex balancing of priorities and factors. Even though these are subjective decisions, they should be made with consideration of all available objective facts. An accurate estimate of the affected cancer patient population by mutation is one variable that has only recently become available to inform funding decisions.

Methods: We compared the overall incident burden of mutations within each cancer-associated gene with two measures of cancer research efforts: research grant funding amounts and numbers of academic manuscripts. We ask to what degree the aggregate set of cancer research efforts reflects the relative burdens of the different cancer genetic drivers. We thoroughly investigate the design of our queries to ensure that the presented results are robust and conclusions are well justified.

Findings: We find cancer research is generally not correlated with the relative burden of mutation within the different genetic drivers of cancer.

Conclusions: We suggest that cancer research would benefit from incorporating, among other factors, an epidemiologically informed mutation-estimate baseline into a larger framework for funding and research allocation decisions.

Funding: This work was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) P30CA014195 and NIH DP2AT011327.