How Much Money Is Spent on Cancer Research Worldwide?

Between 2016 and 2020, public and philanthropic funders alone awarded roughly $24.5 billion to cancer research worldwide, spread across more than 66,000 individual grants.¹ That figure covers only grants from governments and charities. When you add pharmaceutical industry spending on drug development, venture capital flowing into oncology startups, and private-sector clinical trials, the true annual global total is substantially higher. The picture that emerges is one of enormous investment that is nevertheless unevenly distributed across cancer types, countries, and stages of research.

What the Global Totals Actually Include

The most comprehensive recent accounting of cancer research spending comes from a 2023 analysis published in The Lancet Oncology. Researchers catalogued every public and philanthropic cancer research award they could identify worldwide between 2016 and 2020, drawing on funding databases and Cancer Research UK records. The result was that $24.5 billion dataset of 66,388 grants.² This captured project grants, programme grants, fellowships, and pilot projects, but deliberately excluded operational spending on cancer care delivery. It also excluded private industry research and development budgets, which are notoriously difficult to track because pharmaceutical companies report R&D across their entire portfolio rather than by disease area.

An earlier analysis that tracked a network of major public and philanthropic funders found their combined cancer research spending grew from about $5.6 billion in 2006 to $8.5 billion in 2018, an increase that outpaced inflation.³ Going further back, a separate estimate placed the entire global cancer research spend at about 14 billion euros in 2004–2005, with the U.S. National Cancer Institute dominating the landscape.⁴ The trend line is clearly upward over the past two decades, though that growth has not been steady year to year.

A Decline in the Late 2010s and the COVID Effect

Despite the long-term upward trend, the 2016–2020 period actually showed annual funding falling. About $6.6 billion was awarded globally in 2016, accounting for 27 percent of the entire five-year total. By 2020, that had dropped to roughly $2.9 billion, or about 12 percent of the total.² The COVID-19 pandemic clearly played a role in the 2020 collapse, as funders diverted money to infectious disease research and economies contracted. But the decline had already begun before the pandemic, suggesting broader pressures on public research budgets. The proportional allocation across different research phases stayed fairly consistent even as the total shrank, meaning the cuts were not targeted at any one stage of the pipeline.

How the Money Is Split Within Cancer Research

Most cancer research funding goes to early-stage laboratory work. Pre-clinical research, which includes everything from basic biology to animal studies and drug-target discovery, received about 73.5 percent of the public and philanthropic total between 2016 and 2020, or around $18 billion. Clinical trials (phases 1 through 4) got only 7.4 percent, roughly $1.8 billion. Public health research, covering areas like prevention, screening, and health services, received 9.4 percent, and cross-disciplinary work got about 5 percent.²

This heavy tilt toward pre-clinical work is partly by design. Basic science is cheaper per award and generates the ideas that eventually feed clinical testing. But it also means a relatively thin stream of money supports the clinical trials that actually test whether new treatments work in people. The pharmaceutical industry fills some of that gap by funding its own trials, though industry-sponsored trials come with their own constraints around which drugs get tested and who participates.

Which Cancers Get Funded and Which Get Overlooked

One of the most persistent findings in cancer research economics is the mismatch between how much money a cancer type receives and how much damage it inflicts. Breast cancer, which accounts for about 11.7 percent of new cancer cases globally and 6.9 percent of deaths, received a roughly proportionate 11.2 percent of research investment. Lung cancer, with a similar share of new cases (11.4 percent) but a far greater share of deaths (18 percent), received only 5.3 percent of funding.² Brain cancers, meanwhile, are relatively rare but received the highest investment per unit of disease burden, reflecting strong advocacy and the severity of the diagnosis.

This pattern has been documented repeatedly. A U.S.-focused analysis found that breast and prostate cancer had the highest funding-to-lethality scores, while cancers of the esophagus and stomach ranked near the bottom.⁵ The same study found that cancers with higher incidence among racial and ethnic minorities tend to receive lower funding. An earlier analysis of U.S. research spending reached similar conclusions, identifying bladder, esophageal, liver, oral, pancreatic, stomach, and uterine cancers as underfunded relative to their burden.⁶ The pattern is not unique to the United States; Canadian data shows similar misalignment.⁷

Several forces drive these mismatches. Cancers with well-organized patient advocacy groups, like breast and prostate cancer, attract more charitable donations and political attention. Cancers associated with stigma (lung cancer and its link to smoking, liver cancer and its link to alcohol) tend to generate less public sympathy and, in turn, less philanthropic support. And some cancers are simply easier to study than others, which draws researchers and the grants that follow them.

Where in the World the Money Flows

Cancer research funding is overwhelmingly concentrated in wealthy countries. The United States dominates by total dollars spent, followed by the United Kingdom and several other high-income nations. China and Japan contribute large numbers of grants — China accounted for about 22.8 percent of all awards between 2016 and 2020, and Japan about 18.8 percent — but the median size of their grants was far smaller. China’s median award was about $58,000, Japan’s about $40,000, compared with much larger median awards in the U.S. and U.K. As a result, China and Japan each contributed only about 4 percent of the global funding total despite making up more than 40 percent of the award count.²

China’s research output has grown rapidly in volume. Chinese cancer research publications overtook those of the United States in 2018, though publication count and research spending are very different measures of scientific capacity.⁸ At the other end of the spectrum, cancer research is heavily skewed away from the low- and middle-income countries where cancer incidence is rising fastest.⁹ A follow-up analysis found that low-income countries collectively received just $8.4 million in cancer research awards during the study period, less than 0.1 percent of the global total.¹⁰ That figure is striking when you consider that many of the cancers most common in these regions — cervical cancer, liver cancer, stomach cancer — are also among the most underfunded globally.

How Cancer Research Compares With Other Diseases

Cancer consistently attracts more research funding than other major disease categories. A U.K. analysis of spending across cancer, coronary heart disease, stroke, and dementia found that cancer received 71 percent of the combined total — £590 million out of £833 million. Per 1,000 disability-adjusted life-years lost, cancer received £482 in funding, heart disease received £266, dementia received £166, and stroke received just £71.¹¹ The gap was even wider when measured against the economic burden each disease places on health and social care systems: for every £1 million in attributable costs, cancer attracted more than 26 times the research funding that dementia did.

Whether this imbalance is justified depends on your perspective. Cancer research advocates point to the complexity of the disease, the breadth of the research needed, and the tangible progress that investment has delivered. Critics argue that diseases like dementia, which impose enormous costs on families and care systems, are starved of resources relative to their societal impact. These debates tend to generate more heat than light, since funding for one disease rarely comes directly at the expense of another.

What the Private Sector Spends on Cancer Drugs

The pharmaceutical industry’s investment in cancer drug development dwarfs public research funding, but the exact total is difficult to pin down. What we do know is that developing a single cancer drug is extraordinarily expensive. An analysis of 10 cancer drugs approved by the FDA found the median cost per drug was about $648 million, rising to roughly $794 million when adjusted for the cost of capital at a 9 percent rate. Individual drug costs ranged from about $219 million to more than $2.8 billion.¹²

The returns on that investment are substantial. A follow-up study found that by the end of 2017, approved cancer drugs had generated a median of $14.50 in cumulative sales for every dollar invested in R&D. The median time to fully recover even the maximum possible risk-adjusted development cost was about five years.¹³ These figures have fueled debate about whether cancer drug prices reflect the actual cost of innovation or the willingness of health systems to pay for treatments patients desperately need.

Venture Capital and the AI Wave

Beyond traditional pharmaceutical R&D, venture capital has poured into oncology-focused startups. Across all of biopharma and medical devices (not just oncology), venture capital investment in U.S. companies hit all-time highs in the late 2010s, with more than $25 billion invested in 2018 alone. Biopharma deal valuations roughly doubled between 2010 and 2017, reaching $10.5 billion.¹⁴ Oncology has been one of the hottest areas within this broader biopharma boom, driven by the commercial success of immunotherapy drugs and the promise of precision medicine.

More recently, artificial intelligence has attracted a growing share of these dollars. Among AI-focused biopharmaceutical startups, companies building drug discovery tools have seen the most explosive growth, with their median deal size growing from about $190,000 in 2010 to $7.5 million by 2024. Their share of all AI-related biopharma capital went from under 1 percent to about 22 percent during the same period.¹⁵ Whether this AI investment translates into faster or cheaper cancer drug development remains to be seen, but it represents a new and rapidly growing stream of money flowing toward oncology problems.

Pediatric Cancer Gets a Sliver

Childhood cancers occupy a uniquely uncomfortable spot in the funding landscape. By one historical estimate, only about 4 percent of U.S. federal cancer research funding has gone to studying cancer in children and adolescents. Research output in pediatric oncology over the past decade has not kept pace with either other pediatric diseases or adult cancer research, accounting for less than 5 percent of all cancer research publications. Pharmaceutical companies have limited incentive to invest in pediatric oncology drug development because the patient population is small, the market is limited, and regulatory requirements are strict.

This matters because childhood cancers often differ biologically from adult cancers in fundamental ways. Drugs designed for adult tumors do not always work in children, and the long-term side effects of treatment are more consequential when a patient has decades of life ahead. Advocacy groups have pushed for legislative fixes, including laws that require drugmakers to study certain new cancer treatments in children if the underlying biology is relevant. But the funding gap persists, and pediatric oncology researchers frequently describe the struggle to secure grants as one of the field’s defining challenges.

The Cost of Running Clinical Trials

A significant portion of cancer research money goes not to science itself but to the bureaucratic and regulatory infrastructure surrounding clinical trials. An analysis of the actual hours spent running cancer trials found that about 32 percent of all staff time went to nonclinical activities — things like preparing regulatory submissions, filling out case report forms, and managing institutional review board processes. On average, it cost about $6,000 per enrolled patient for an industry-sponsored trial, and roughly a third of that was nonclinical overhead.¹⁶

The regulatory burden has grown over time. The timeline from drug discovery to marketing approval stretched from about 8 years in 1960 to 12 to 15 years more recently, and a provocative analysis in the Journal of Clinical Oncology argued that the added regulatory complexity has not delivered commensurate safety improvements. Toxic death rates in early-phase trials dropped modestly from 0.8 percent in 1979 to 0.5 percent by 2002, but simulations suggested that the delays caused by tighter regulation may cost tens to hundreds of thousands of life-years by keeping effective therapies from patients who need them.¹⁷ Not everyone agrees with that framing — regulatory safeguards exist for real reasons, and it is easy to underestimate the harm caused by an unsafe drug reaching the market. But the tension between speed and safety is real, and it shapes how productively every research dollar is spent.

Does Cancer Research Spending Pay Off?

One way to evaluate cancer research investment is to estimate the health returns it generates. A U.K. study attempted exactly that, calculating the internal rate of return on publicly funded cancer research by tracing the path from published papers to clinical guidelines to measurable health gains. The result was a best-estimate return of about 10 percent per year, meaning that for every pound invested in cancer research, the eventual health benefits grew at roughly 10 percent annually over the lag between investment and clinical impact.¹⁸ That was slightly higher than a comparable estimate for cardiovascular disease research, which returned about 9 percent. These figures suggest that public cancer research investment compares favorably with other long-term investments, though the benefits take decades to materialize and are inherently uncertain.

Philanthropic investments also appear to punch above their weight. An evaluation of grants from Australia’s National Breast Cancer Foundation found that funded research teams leveraged an additional $1.40 in outside funding for every dollar the foundation invested, effectively multiplying the impact of charitable donations. These grants also produced downstream effects that are hard to put a price on — changes in clinical practice, new diagnostic tools, and trained researchers who went on to lead their own programs.¹⁹

Complementary and Alternative Medicine Within Cancer Research

A small but not trivial stream of cancer research funding goes toward studying complementary and alternative medicine. The U.S. National Cancer Institute has spent around $120 million per year on research projects examining things like nutrition therapies, acupuncture, herbal medicines, and traditional Chinese medicine as they relate to cancer prevention, treatment, and symptom management.²⁰ A broader global analysis of research funding for traditional and integrative medicine found that cancer and cardiovascular disease together accounted for more than half of all topic-categorized grants in that space, with cancer-related grants totaling about $5.8 billion across the study period.²¹ Much of this research focuses not on replacing conventional treatment but on managing side effects like nausea, pain, and fatigue that accompany chemotherapy and radiation.

Patient Advocacy Groups as Research Funders

Beyond the large charities like the American Cancer Society and Cancer Research UK, a growing number of small patient advocacy organizations have begun directly funding research. These groups are often organized around a specific cancer subtype or molecular marker and fill gaps that larger funders overlook. One example is ALK Positive, a patient-led group focused on a particular genetic alteration in lung cancer, which awards competitive grants for translational research and works to accelerate clinical trials for therapies targeting that mutation.²² The dollar amounts from any single advocacy group tend to be modest compared with government agencies, but their influence extends beyond money — they connect researchers with patients, shape trial design by advocating for patient-relevant endpoints, and sometimes broker collaborations between academic labs and industry that would not happen otherwise. In an era of precision oncology where treatments increasingly target narrow molecular subtypes, these niche funders are becoming more relevant to the overall research landscape.

1
The Lancet Oncology. Global funding for cancer research between 2016 and 2020: a content analysis of public and philanthropic investments
2
The Lancet Oncology. Global funding for cancer research between 2016 and 2020: a content analysis of public and philanthropic investments – Section: Results
3
PubMed Central. Trends in International Cancer Research Investment 2006-2018
4
PubMed Central. Trends in the global funding and activity of cancer research
5
PubMed Central. Urgent need to mitigate disparities in federal funding for cancer research
6
PubMed Central. A comparison of cancer burden and research spending reveals discrepancies in the distribution of research funding
7
PubMed Central. Discrepancies between Canadian cancer research funding and site-specific cancer burden: a spotlight on ten disease sites
8
PubMed Central. Chinese Cancer Research in 2009-18 and the Disease Burden
9
PubMed Central. Priorities for cancer research in low- and middle-income countries: a global perspective
10
The Lancet Oncology. Study reveals global inequalities in cancer research funding
11
PubMed. UK research expenditure on dementia, heart disease, stroke and cancer: are levels of spending related to disease burden?
12
PubMed Central. Research and Development Spending to Bring a Single Cancer Drug to Market and Revenues After Approval
13
JAMA Network Open. Comparison of Sales Income and Research and Development Costs for FDA-Approved Cancer Drugs Sold by Originator Drug Companies
14
JAMA Oncology. How Is Money Changing Medicine?—Venture Capital Investment in Oncology
15
PubMed Central. Trends in Venture Capital Investment in AI-Driven Biopharmaceutical Startups
16
PubMed. The costs of conducting clinical research
17
PubMed. Equipoise lost: ethics, costs, and the regulation of cancer clinical research
18
PubMed Central. Estimating the returns to UK publicly funded cancer-related research in terms of the net value of improved health outcomes
19
PubMed. Evaluation of the impact of National Breast Cancer Foundation-funded research
20
PubMed. Cancer complementary and alternative medicine research at the US National Cancer Institute
21
PubMed Central. Global research funding for traditional, complementary and integrative medicine
22
PubMed Central. Patient-led advocacy in ALK-positive lung cancer