Why Risk-Takers Today Are Fueling Tomorrow's Cancer Cures

Every time a new cancer breakthrough makes headlines, society celebrates while systematically starving the very research ecosystem that produces them.

By deprioritizing and underinvesting in early-stage research, we are actively putting the future of discovery at risk - a misstep we cannot afford to take, especially now.

New projections from the World Health Organization predict that cancer cases will nearly double by 2050. Cancer rates among younger adults are multiplying. There’s growing competition for NIH grants, and, at the same time, rising uncertainty around federal research funding; we are at a critical juncture at which we must proceed strategically, with care, and with speed. If not, we risk constricting the pipeline of innovation.\

Across the country, promising ideas never make it out of the lab; not because they fail scientifically, but because they never receive the funding needed to find out whether they work. Our research ecosystem isn't bottlenecked because scientists lack brilliant ideas – it’s choke-pointed by a system that has been designed to minimize the very risk necessary for breakthroughs.

Federal agencies prioritize projects supported by preliminary data. Pharmaceutical companies must answer to investors looking for a realistic commercial pathway. Universities increasingly depend on external funding to sustain laboratories. Together, those incentives create an unintended consequence: the boldest, earliest-stage ideas often become the hardest, least likely to receive funding from traditional institutions, even with the potential of becoming the “miracles” we all hope for.

Those same organizations then present an impossible ask - for scientists to prove a discovery will work before giving them the resources to discover whether it can.

But what kind of discoveries are we losing because we've become uncomfortable with funding uncertainty?

We readily accept that startup companies require seed investors long before they become profitable. Scientific discovery is no different. Before a researcher can compete for major federal grants, someone has to provide the first investment - the funding that turns a promising hypothesis into evidence.

This is precisely the gap nonprofit research foundations have quietly filled for decades. As uncertainty around traditional funding continues, their flexibility to support bold ideas and promising researchers has made their role increasingly important, not as a replacement for the NIH or larger companies, but as an essential first source of support for promising science that other institutions cannot yet fund. At Tower Cancer Research Foundation, for example, we have seen how relatively modest investments in early-stage research allow researchers to generate the preliminary evidence needed to unlock federal grants and larger institutional support down the line. Since 2006, Tower has invested approximately $5.1 million in junior research grants, and those researchers have gone on to secure more than $62.5 million in additional funding from national and global sources. Research supported by Tower has also contributed to the FDA approval of 15 new cancer drugs, expanding treatment options for patients worldwide.

Remember, immunotherapy, precision medicine, and targeted therapies all began as uncertain ideas long before they became standards of care.

In these, we have seen firsthand how investing in early-stage research with seed funding is an essential jumping-off point. It’s the release of the bottleneck. As organizations, it’s our responsibility to find ways to keep the stream of discovery steady, strong, and full.

Every promising study that never begins represents more than a missed scientific opportunity. It causes patients to wait longer for better therapies, families to spend more years with fewer treatment options, and brilliant researchers to leave academia because the funding simply isn't there.

After years of working with researchers and donors alike, I've learned that philanthropy has its greatest impact not by following scientific consensus, but by helping promising ideas survive long enough to become it.

This is where philanthropy must be willing to lead, to do what government, industry, and traditional funding mechanisms often cannot: act as a catalyst. The most effective philanthropic investments aren't always those that fund established programs; they're the ones willing to underwrite possibility and pursue an idea before its outcome is assured. By supporting early-stage science before the data are complete, donors can help researchers generate evidence, attract larger sources of support, and determine which ideas have the potential to move cancer care forward. In that sense, philanthropy isn't simply filling a funding gap; it's creating the conditions that allow the rest of the research ecosystem to function.

This approach, however, requires accepting that not every study will result in a new treatment and recognizing that this does not make that investment a failure.  It’s a different way of thinking about impact; success can’t always be measured only by the studies that produce new drugs. It must be measured by how well we are building a pipeline of discovery. Some projects won't succeed, and that's not a failure of philanthropy. It's how scientific progress works. Every breakthrough stands on countless questions that didn't lead to the answer but brought researchers one step closer to finding it.

If we want tomorrow's cures, philanthropists have to start funding tomorrow's ideas today. Breakthroughs don't begin with certainty. They begin with someone willing to believe an unanswered question is worth asking.

The next time a cancer breakthrough makes headlines, celebrate it. Then remember that long before it became a miracle, it was simply an unanswered question that someone chose to believe was worth funding. If we want more headlines celebrating cures, we need more donors willing to invest before certainty exists. Because breakthroughs don't begin with evidence; they begin with someone courageous enough to fund the search for it.