As America begins its recovery from the COVID pandemic, there is an important part of our health care system that remains stalled – cancer clinical trials.
When COVID struck, federally-funded clinical trials were immediately halted as it was no longer safe for scientists to be in labs and for patients with compromised immune systems to be visiting crowded medical facilities.
Many cancer researchers and institutions did all they could to keep their trials going. Some researchers added telehealth, shipped experimental medications to participants and even halted funding new research to preserve money.
However, the federal grants provided to cancer researchers in 2019 or early 2020 simply didn’t account for a pandemic and the associated costs of having to shut down and then restart research. New specimens must be taken. Tests must be repeated. Additional supplies must be purchased.
While our nation cautiously looks toward an improving pandemic picture, scientists still do not have the funding they need to restart many of these potentially lifesaving initiatives.
Please join us in asking Congress to provide funding to restart clinical trials and ensure that potentially lifesaving breakthroughs are not lost.
You can send a message to your members of Congress right now using ACS CAN’s easy action form. It takes less than a minute to do, but the impact could be huge.
ACS CAN is the advocacy affiliate of the American Cancer Society working with local, state and federal lawmakers to make fighting cancer a priority.
Cancer patients need that next cure. They need that next breakthrough treatment. Please take this simple action and let’s be sure cancer clinical trials get the funding they need to help save more lives from cancer.