ArticleAdvances in radiation oncology2025
National Institutes of Health Funding to Support Radiation Oncology Research: A Comparative Trend Analysis Over a Decade, 2011-2021.
Article in Advances in radiation oncology, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
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Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
13 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Purpose: Funding to support radiation oncology discovery and research is essential for advancement in therapeutic strategies to improve outcomes for patients with cancer. We aimed to comprehensively characterize trends in National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding that supports radiation oncology research over time to identify trends, successes, and areas for improvement. Methods and Materials: We queried the NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools Expenditures and Results database to identify all awarded grants to support radiation oncology research conducted by principal investigators at academic centers, using 3 individual years as representative samples (2011, 2016, and 2021). Abstracts and keywords for resulting grants were manually searched to identify resulting awards topically related to the field of radiation oncology; principal investigators departmental affiliation was also used as a supplemental method serving as a sensitivity analysis to define radiation oncology-related research. Descriptive statistics were used to describe patterns in funding. χ Results: Less than 0.5% of the total NIH budget and < 2% of the total National Cancer Institute budget supported radiation oncology research during the representative study years. There were no significant changes in this allocation pattern over time. A small cohort of institutions held a relatively large proportion of NIH-supported radiation oncology grant funding. Individuals holding PhDs alone received the majority of funding (62%), whereas those with dual-degrees (MD/PhD) held 21% of funding, and those with MD alone were awarded 17% of funding. There was a trend toward an increased proportion of grants awarded to MD/PhDs over time (24% vs 15% in 2021 and 2011, respectively, Conclusions: Despite radiation therapy's essential role in multidisciplinary cancer care, NIH, and National Cancer Institute funding to support radiation oncology research has remained disproportionally low over the last decade. These data may be useful to inform future policy aimed at promoting research advancement in radiation oncology both at the micro (individual) as well as macro (institutional and national) level.
Identifiers
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.