Emphasizing The Need to Sustain Kidney Cancer Research Funding at KCRS 2025

Unless Congress acts, there may be zero federal funding for kidney cancer research in the foreseeable future, according to Bryan Lewis, the president and cofounder of KidneyCAN.

CancerNetwork® spoke with Lewis at the 2025 Kidney Cancer Research Summit (KCRS), hosted by KidneyCAN, about the recent impacts on governmental funding for kidney cancer research and how these changes correlated with themes discussed at the meeting. According to Lewis, dedicated congressional funding for research in the field had steadily grown within the last decade, which even inspired the creation of this annual meeting.

Following the 2024 US election, however, the government rescinded funding from the Department of Defense (DoD) and NIH for kidney cancer research. The lost funding, as Lewis described, became a prominent point of discussion at the most recent KCRS meeting.

KidneyCAN is a nonprofit organization with a mission to accelerate cures for kidney cancer through education, advocacy, and research funding. Learn more about KidneyCAN’s mission and work here.

Transcript:

We've been devastated [in] the community—the research community and the patient community. Going back [with] a little bit of history, the first dedicated federal funding for kidney cancer research was in 2018. It was fiscal year 2017 for the government [and] $10 million was appropriated through a program in Congress called the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program, CDMRP. They subsequently named it KCRP for the Kidney Cancer Research Program.

The meeting that we're at here today, the seventh KCRS meeting, was directly born out of that funding idea through Congress. Anyway, in [fiscal year] 2018, we got $5 million more; it was $15 [million], and we went up to $20 [million]. We were able to advocate and get it up to $40 million and then $50 million annually up until [fiscal year] 2024.

The $50 million was appropriated in [fiscal year] 2024. We started going into [fiscal year] 2025. [After the 2024] election, the government reined in all research funding, both at the [Department of Defense] as well as at the [National Institutes of Health]—$50 million annual appropriation has now gone to zero. Our current state of affairs is that unless Congress acts, we could be looking at zero funding level here for the foreseeable future. That became a part of the theme of this year's meeting because this meeting was based on that concept of the funding from the federal government, and we want to see it come back.