Medical philanthropy likes to debate money. How much is needed, how it’s distributed, and where it’s going. What the sector is less comfortable doing, is understanding how resilient that funding system is when it comes to external shocks. In 2025, our research tracking investments in health research aimed to tackle this discomfort.

This analysis, specifically looking at global cancer research funding, mapped 107,955 awards between the years of 2016 and 2023 inclusive, and with their combined worth of $51.4 billion, the breakdown of these investments reveals something that may be surprising.

Understanding Current Health Funding Biases

One of the most significant things our research revealed was that cancer research investment is heavily weighted toward preclinical laboratory science (76 percent), leaving public health (8.1 percent) and clinical trials (7.3 percent) receiving a much smaller share.

The problem is, the majority of pre-clinical experiments won’t translate into direct patient and societal benefit, and this funding skew is a heavy gamble on laboratory breakthroughs over improving existing cancer patient care.

Another stark observation was the way funding is awarded to institutions in a small set of high-income countries, while low-income-countries received less than 0.1% of total investment monitored. In addition, social network analysis of research collaboration revealed the periphery positioning of low-income nations. Taken together, these mean that low-income nations rarely receive direct research funding and are often marginalised in research collaboration.

The result is not just an equity problem; it’s an oversight on impact.

Wider Shifts and Their Impacts

The implication of these funding biases is that countries facing the fastest-growing future cancer burdens, such as Gambia, Niger, and Somalia, have the least involvement in priority-setting and the shaping of research agendas. This reinforces a persistent gap between where investment goes and where need is greatest, and it substantially narrows innovation pathways.

In addition, the pressure on US federal funding for non-defence research in 2025 has further squeezed and terminated core research programmes, displacing many scientists in the process. Specific programmes on areas such as misinformation, vaccine hesitancy, infectious diseases, and research on people from under-represented ethnic and gender groups were particularly targeted, and in 2026, the situation will likely worsen with a further 40% budget cut planned.

Read the full article about medical philanthropy by Anbang Du and Michael Head at Alliance Magazine.