Money for New Clinical Trials to Be Tight After Virus Shuts Labs (1)

Restarting clinical trials idled by the coronavirus will chew into the National Cancer Institute’s budget, meaning fewer new studies will get funded without a boost from Congress, the institute’s director warned.

While universities can keep paying researchers who can’t work on their grant projects, ramping up that research again will increase the projects’ time and costs, Ned Sharpless, director of the National Cancer Institute, said in an interview. Funding for clinical trials was already stretched before the pandemic.

“That’s really starting to become a major concern of mine for ’21,” Sharpless said. “We will need budgetary support to continue our ...