Jeffrey MacKeigan, Michigan State University

Cancer research in the U.S. doesn’t rely on a single institution or funding stream − it’s a complex ecosystem made up of interdependent parts: academia, pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology startups, federal agencies and private foundations. As a cancer biologist who has worked in each of these sectors over the past three decades, I’ve seen firsthand how each piece supports the others.

When one falters, the whole system becomes vulnerable.

The United States has long led the world in cancer research. It has spent more on cancer research than any other country, including more than US$7.2 billion annually through the National Cancer Institute alone. Since the 1971 National Cancer Act, this sustained public investment has helped drive dramatic declines in cancer mortality, with death rates falling by 34% since 1991. In the past five years, the Food and Drug Administration has approved over 100 new cancer drugs, and the U.S. has brought more cancer drugs to the global market than any other nation.

But that legacy is under threat. Funding delays, political shifts and instability across sectors have created an environment where basic research into the fundamentals of cancer biology is struggling to keep traction and the drug development pipeline is showing signs of stress.

These disruptions go far beyond uncertainty and have real consequences. Early-career scientists faced with unstable funding and limited job prospects may leave academia altogether. Mid-career researchers often spend more time chasing scarce funding than conducting research. Interrupted research budgets and shifting policy priorities can unravel multiyear collaborations. I, along with many other researchers, believe these setbacks will slow progress, break training pipelines and drain expertise from critical areas of cancer research – delays that ultimately hurt patients waiting for new treatments.

A 50-year foundation of federal investment

The modern era of U.S. cancer research began with the signing of the National Cancer Act in 1971. That law dramatically expanded the National Cancer Institute, an agency within the National Institutes of Health focusing on cancer research and education. The NCI laid the groundwork for a robust national infrastructure for cancer science, funding everything from early research in the lab to large-scale clinical trials and supporting the training of a generation of cancer researchers.

This federal support has driven advances leading to higher survival rates and the transformation of some cancers into a manageable chronic or curable condition. Progress in screening, diagnostics and targeted therapies – and the patients who have benefited from them – owe much to decades of NIH support.

But federal funding has always been vulnerable to political headwinds. During the first Trump administration, deep cuts to biomedical science budgets threatened to stall the progress made under initiatives such as the 2016 Cancer Moonshot. The rationale given for these cuts was to slash overall spending, despite facing strong bipartisan opposition in Congress. Lawmakers ultimately rejected the administration’s proposal and instead increased NIH funding. In 2022, the Biden administration worked to relaunch the Cancer Moonshot.

This uncertainty has worsened in 2025 as the second Trump administration has cut or canceled many NIH grants. Labs that relied on these awards are suddenly facing funding cliffs, forcing them to lay off staff, pause experiments or shutter entirely. Deliberate delays in communication from the Department of Health and Human Services have stalled new NIH grant reviews and funding decisions, putting many promising research proposals already in the pipeline at risk.

Philanthropy’s support is powerful – but limited

While federal agencies remain the backbone of cancer research funding, philanthropic organizations provide the critical support for breakthroughs – especially for new ideas and riskier projects.

Groups such as the American Cancer Society, Stand Up To Cancer and major hospital foundations have filled important gaps in support, often funding pilot studies or supporting early-career investigators before they secure federal grants. By supporting bold ideas and providing seed funding, they help launch innovative research that may later attract large-scale support from the NIH.

Without the bureaucratic constraints of federal agencies, philanthropy is more nimble and flexible. It can move faster to support work in emerging areas, such as immunotherapy and precision oncology. For example, the American Cancer Society grant review process typically takes about four months from submission, while the NIH grant review process takes an average of eight months.

But philanthropic funds are smaller in scale and often disease-specific. Many foundations are created around a specific cause, such as advancing cures for pancreatic, breast or pediatric cancers. Their urgency to make an impact allows them to fund bold approaches that federal funders may see as too preliminary or speculative. Their giving also fluctuates. For instance, the American Cancer Society awarded nearly $60 million less in research grants in 2020 compared with 2019.

While private foundations are vital partners for cancer research, they cannot replace the scale and consistency of federal funding. Total U.S. philanthropic funding for cancer research is estimated at a few billion dollars per year, spread across hundreds of organizations. In comparison, the federal government has typically contributed roughly five to eight times more than philanthropy to cancer research each year.

Industry innovation − and its priorities

Private-sector innovation is essential for translating discoveries into treatments. In 2021, nearly 80% of the roughly $57 billion the U.S. spent on cancer drugs came from pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Many of the treatments used in oncology today, including immunotherapies and targeted therapies, emerged from collaborations between academic labs and industry partners.

But commercial priorities don’t always align with public health needs. Companies naturally focus on areas with strong financial returns: common cancers, projects that qualify for fast-track regulatory approval, and high-priced drugs. Rare cancers, pediatric cancers and basic science often receive less attention.

Industry is also saddled with uncertainty. Rising R&D costs, tough regulatory requirements and investor wariness have created a challenging environment to bring new drugs to market. Several biotech startups have folded or downsized in the past year, leaving promising new drugs stranded in limbo in the lab before they can reach clinical trials.

Without federal or philanthropic entities to pick up the slack, these discoveries may never reach the patients who need them.

A system under strain

Cancer is not going away. As the U.S. population ages, the burden of cancer on society will only grow. Disparities in treatment access and outcomes persist across race, income and geography. And factors such as environmental exposures and infectious diseases continue to intersect with cancer risk in new and complex ways.

Addressing these challenges requires a strong, stable and well-coordinated research system. But that system is under strain. National Cancer Institute grant paylines, or funding cutoffs, remain highly competitive. Early-career researchers face precarious job prospects. Labs are losing technicians and postdoctoral researchers to higher-paying roles in industry or to burnout. And patients, especially those hoping to enroll in clinical trials, face delays, disruptions and dwindling options.

This is not just a funding issue. It’s a coordination issue between the federal government, academia and industry. There are currently no long-term policy solutions that ensure sustained federal investment, foster collaboration between academia and industry, or make room for philanthropy to drive innovation instead of just filling gaps.

I believe that for the U.S. to remain a global leader in cancer research, it will need to recommit to the model that made success possible: a balanced ecosystem of public funding, private investment and nonprofit support. Up until recently, that meant fully funding the NIH and NCI with predictable, long-term budgets that allow labs to plan for the future; incentivizing partnerships that move discoveries from bench to bedside without compromising academic freedom; supporting career pathways for young scientists so talent doesn’t leave the field; and creating mechanisms for equity to ensure that research includes and benefits all communities.

Cancer research and science has come a long way, saving about 4.5 million lives in the U.S. from cancer from 1991 to 2022. Today, patients are living longer and better because of decades of hard-won discoveries made by thousands of researchers. But science doesn’t run on good intentions alone. It needs universities. It needs philanthropy. It needs industry. It needs vision. And it requires continued support from the federal government.

Jeffrey MacKeigan, Professor of Pediatrics and Human Development, Michigan State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Jacqueline Reber, Iowa State University

Did you eat cereal this morning? Or have you walked on a gravel path? Maybe you had a headache and had to take a pill? If you answered any of these questions with a yes, you interacted with a granular system today.

Scientists classify any collection of small, hard particles – such as puffed rice, sand grains or pills – as a granular system.

Even though everyone has interacted with these kinds of systems, describing the physics of how the particles collectively act when they are close together is surprisingly hard.

Granular systems sometimes move like a fluid. Think of an hourglass where sand, a very typical granular material, flows from one half of the glass to the other. But if you’ve run on a beach, you know that sand can also act like a solid. You can move over it without sinking through the sand.

As a geologist, I’m interested in understanding when a granular system flows and when it has strength and behaves like a solid. This line of research is very important for many agricultural and industrial applications, such as moving corn kernels or pills in a pipeline or shoot.

Understanding when a granular system might flow is also essential for geologic hazard assessments. For example, geologists would like to know whether the various boulders making up the slope of a mountain are stable or whether they will move as a rockslide.

Transferring forces between grains

To understand the behavior of a granular system, scientists can zoom in and look at the interactions between individual grains. When two particles are in contact with each other, they can transfer forces between each other.

Imagine this scenario: You have three tennis balls – the grains in this experiment. You place the tennis balls in a row and squeeze the three balls between your hand and a wall, so that your hand presses against the first ball. The last ball is in contact with a wall, but the middle ball is free floating and touches only the other two balls.

By pushing against the first ball, you have successfully transferred the force from your hand through the row of three tennis balls onto the wall, even though you’ve touched only the first ball.

Now imagine you have many grains, like in a pile of sand, and all the sand grains are in contact with some neighboring grains. Grains that touch transfer forces between each other. How the forces are distributed in this granular system dictates whether the system is stable and unmoving or if it will move – such as a rockslide or the sand in an hourglass.

Tracking forces in the lab

This is where my research team comes in. Together with my students, I study how grains interact with each other in the laboratory.

In our experiments, we can visualize the forces between individual grains in a granular system. While all granular systems have these forces present, we cannot see their distribution because force is invisible in most grains, such as sand or pills. We can see the forces only in some transparent materials.

To make the forces visible, we made grains using a material that is transparent and has a special property called photoelasticity. When photoelastic materials are illuminated and experience force, they split light into two rays that travel at different speeds.

This property forms bright, colorful bands in the otherwise transparent material that make the force visible. The brightness of the grains depends on how much force a grain is experiencing, so we can see how the forces are distributed in the granular system. The particles themselves do not emit light, but they change how fast light rays travel through them when they experience force – which makes them appear brighter.

Scientists before us have used photoelasticity to visualize force in granular materials. These previous experiments, however, have examined only a single layer of grains. We developed a method to see the forces in not just a single layer of grains but throughout a whole heap.

Observing the forces on the outside of the heap of grains is pretty easy, but seeing how the forces are distributed in the middle of the pile is a lot harder. To see into the middle of the granular system and to illuminate grains there, we used a laser light sheet.

To generate a laser light sheet, we manipulated a laser beam so that the light spread out into a very narrow sheet.

With this light sheet, we illuminated one slice throughout the granular system. On this illuminated slice, we could see which grains were transferring forces, similarly to the previous two-dimensional experiments, without having to worry about the third dimension.

We then collected information from many slices across different parts of the grain heap. We used the information from the individual slices to reconstruct the three-dimensional granular system.

This technique is similar to how doctors reconstruct three-dimensional shapes of the brain and other organs from the two-dimensional images obtained by a medical CT scanner.

In our current experiments, we’ve been using only a small number of grains – 107. This way we can keep track of every individual grain and test whether this method works to see the force distribution in three dimensions. These 107 grains fill a cube-shaped box that is about 4 inches (10 centimeters) wide, tall and deep.

So far, the experimental method is working well, and we’ve been able to see how the force is distributed between the 107 grains. Next, we plan to expand the experimental setup to include more grains and explore how the force changes when we agitate the granular system – for example, by bumping it.

This new experimental approach opens the door for many more experiments that will help us to better understand granular systems. These systems are all around you, and while they seem so simple, researchers still don’t truly understand how they behave.

Jacqueline Reber, Associate Professor of Earth, Atmosphere, and Climate, Iowa State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Meghan Wilson, Michigan State University and John Kuk, Michigan State University

As outside temperatures dropped to the low- to mid-teens Fahrenheit on Feb. 10, 2025, two children died of carbon monoxide toxicity in a family van parked in a Detroit casino parking garage.

We are political scientists who study urban and housing public policies, and in the months since this tragedy, we took a deep look at the trends in homelessness and housing policies that foreshadowed the events of that night.

More kids are experiencing homelessness

One important trend is that the number of homeless children in the city reached a record high in 2024. This is true even though the overall numbers of people experiencing homelessness in the city is declining overall.

According to the Point-in-Time count, 455 children were experiencing homelessness in Detroit on Jan. 31, 2024, up from 312 the year before. The count captures data for one night each year.

Most of these children were unhoused but considered sheltered because they had a place to sleep in an emergency shelter or transitional housing, or were able to temporarily stay with family or friends.

Nineteen of the kids were unsheltered – meaning they were sleeping in places not designed for human habitation, like cars, parks or abandoned buildings.

A different set of data comes from the Detroit Public Schools. The district looked at the entire 2022-2023 school year and found that roughly 1 in 19 students were unhoused at some point during that nine-month period — more than double the number in the 2019-2020 school year.

A lack of temporary solutions

The lack of adequate funding and staffing in the city’s shelter system means unhoused people often struggle to access temporary shelter beds.

That includes kids. Even though the city prioritizes giving beds to the most vulnerable, the number of unsheltered children of school age has nearly tripled in three years, rising from an estimated 48 in the school year beginning in September 2019 to 142 in the school year beginning in September 2022. These figures align with the rise in unsheltered children recorded in the one-night Point-in-Time count, which increased from four in 2016 to 19 in 2024.

The end of COVID-era funding that prevented many evictions is likely to increase the need for shelter and put additional strain on Detroit’s response to the crisis.

Gaps in a vital system

Children who experience housing insecurity are often caught in the middle of bureaucracy and failed regulation.

The mother of the children who died in February had reached out to the city in November 2024 when they were staying with a family member. The mother noted that she wanted to keep all five of her children together.

According to a report issued by the city, the Detroit Housing Authority did not follow up with her. Her situation was not considered an emergency at the time of contact since she was sheltered with family.

At the time of the call, the family was a Category 2: immediate risk of homelessness – in other words, not the highest priority under the emergency shelter grants guideline. If the city had deemed the situation an emergency, protocol would be to dispatch immediate support for the family.

The mother moved her family to the van after the request for help failed to provide a solution.

The Detroit mayor’s office admitted that the family fell through the cracks and promised to expand available shelter beds and require homeless outreach employees to visit any unhoused families that call for help.

“We have to make sure that we do everything possible to make sure that this doesn’t happen again,” Deputy Mayor Melia Howard told local media.

More than 8 in 10 placed on wait list

According to records from the Coordinated Assessment Model Detroit, the system responsible for connecting individuals to shelters, 82% of calls do not result in immediate help but rather being placed on a shelter waitlist. Similar to instances across the country, the wait time is long.

Families in Detroit face an average wait of 130 days, while unaccompanied youth typically wait around 50 days.

The long wait for shelter has contributed to the rise in people living on the streets or in their vehicles. The number of unsheltered individuals — including both adults and children — doubled from 151 in 2015 to 305 in 2024. This trend of increasing unsheltered homelessness contrasts with the overall decline in the total number of homeless people in the city, which is down from a peak of 2,597 in 2015.

Children need safety and security to thrive.

Their access to stable housing depends on their parents and what the adults in their life are able to provide. As rents increase in the city, some children are left vulnerable.

Stricter regulations

Over the past decade, Detroit, like many other U.S. cities, has experienced rising housing costs while wages fail to keep up, particularly for long-term residents.

Since 2021, the number of rentals in the city has increased by 51%.

Rents are also up. Since 2017, the average rent in Detroit has increased 55% for single-family homes and 43% for multifamily homes.

While inflation and increased maintenance costs contribute to this rise, stricter rental regulations like the heightened enforcement of housing codes, expanded tenant protections and higher compliance cost for landlords have played an important role.

Some landlords pass the expense of these regulations on to tenants, making housing less affordable. Others leave their properties vacant, pushing up prices by lessening the supply.

The current average fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Detroit is $1,314 per month. For the typical household in the city, this basic shelter cost, not including utilities, makes up 41% of the household income.

For the lowest-income households, any unexpected expense can disrupt a delicate financial balance and lead to eviction and homelessness. Children in these situations often face major instability, moving between shelters – or, as in the case of the children who died in February, sleeping in cars.

This kind of displacement disrupts education, strains mental health and increases exposure to danger.

Detroit’s stricter housing regulations may have improved conditions for some renters, but a report by Outlier Media shows that only 8% of landlords are in compliance, leaving legacy residents in subpar rentals at higher prices.

And these new rules have victims who are too often ignored until tragedy strikes.

Meghan Wilson, Assistant Professor of American Politics and Public Policy, Michigan State University and John Kuk, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Michigan State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.