29-05-2025
Cancer doc's $50B ask to Trump
INFLUENCERS
Dr. Wafik El-Deiry, a cancer researcher and associate dean for oncology at Brown University, has an unlikely sales pitch for President Donald Trump: Pick me to lead the nation's cancer research and give me a lot more money to spend on it.
Despite slashing billions in health research grants and proposing further cuts in next year's budget, Trump is considering El-Deiry to lead the National Cancer Institute after a recent interview for the job.
'It has been clear to me for some time that the budget of NCI should be somewhere between $25 billion and $50 billion,' El-Deiry wrote in The Cancer Letter, an industry publication, in May. He argued that the U.S. has underinvested in cancer research for decades — even amid former President Joe Biden's cancer moonshot plan to halve the death rate from the disease — and is losing ground to foreign rivals.
'It is important to recognize that a current very big elephant is that even if the 40 percent reduction in NIH budget is somehow avoided, the lack of investment for two decades put the U.S. behind,' he added.
With NCI's $7.2 billion budget partly frozen by Trump due to his ideological disputes and feuds with universities, it's a bold pitch. The position has been vacant since the last institute head, W. Kimryn Rathmell, quit three days before Trump's inauguration.
But El-Deiry has something in common with many others serving in top jobs in Trump's health department: He was attacked online for his views during the pandemic.
NIH head Jay Bhattacharya, the Stanford health policy professor and critic of lockdowns, would be his boss if Trump chooses El-Deiry to lead the institute. They met online during the pandemic when Bhattacharya, who has made free speech and scientific dissent central to his NIH agenda, came under heavy criticism for arguing that most Americans should go about their daily lives.
El-Deiry spoke with Erin about where his views dovetail with the administration's and where they diverge.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can science and Make America Healthy Again coexist?
I actually think Trump's boldness and disruptiveness could work in the favor of science. But there has to be more discourse about the future. I don't think an America First agenda will succeed in science if we don't invest in research and science to be No. 1.
One tenet of the MAHA agenda is that Americans spend more on health care but have shorter life expectancy and worse health outcomes than countries that spend less.
I call it atrophy, neglect and abandonment over the last 20 years in investing in science. Maybe that neglect and lack of investment for decades is in part responsible for current life expectancy.
How do you square that with DOGE's push to streamline government?
I'm not suggesting taxpayer money allocated for research is a handout or an entitlement. I absolutely believe there should be accountability, and there shouldn't be waste, there shouldn't be inefficiency. God knows, there's plenty of that, and maybe some corruption on top of that. All of those things need to be addressed.
I would look at it a little bit differently. We've invested more. We've led the world. There isn't a better system. We've solved many of the world's health problems. We've made breakthroughs. Most of the Nobel Prizes going back decades are based on NIH research and discoveries at our academic institutions.
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SAFETY CHECK
The Coalition for Health AI has announced its first assurance lab for vetting health care AI.
The alliance of health systems, clinics, and tech companies has been working for years to launch labs to help AI makers prove their products are safe to use in medicine.
This week, BeeKeeperAI became the first CHAI-certified assurance lab. The company tests algorithms on health system data while keeping patient information confidential. The CHAI certification qualifies it to rapidly test AI models on real-world chronic health failure datasets from Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta and New York's Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. To start, BeeKeeper will only vet heart failure-related AI.
Why it matters: Rolling out the labs is taking longer than CHAI initially expected and the project's impact on the market remains unclear.
Last summer, CHAI said that some 30 institutions were interested in becoming assurance labs. By December, the organization said it was certifying labs within Mayo Clinic, UMass Memorial Medical Center, and five startups. It initially planned to have its first labs certified in the first quarter of this year.
BeeKeeperAI CEO Michael Blum says assurance labs like his will add more disease categories over time. For now the scope is narrowly on heart health.
'You'll pick the big, important disease spaces where people are developing drugs or developing algorithms, because they want to impact big disease problems,' he said. He pointed to an opportunity to vet neurodegenerative disease-related AI and cancer models. But to do so, BeeKeeper needs health system partners who can provide specialized datasets that the AI can be vetted against.
What's next: The debate over how best to vet AI's use in health continues.
Solera Network, which connects patients with digital health benefits — like at-home blood pressure readings and online physical therapy — is planning to announce a framework for governing AI products on its platform next week.
The Digital Medicine Society, which partners with drug and biotech companies to promote health tech, is working on AI certification programs. So is which seeks to bring doctors and AI companies together to improve the tech tools, and the National Committee for Quality Assurance, a Washington nonprofit that offers health organizations a seal of approval. The Peterson Health Technology Institute is also working on a way to evaluate these tools.
CHAI isn't putting all its money on the assurance lab concept. Earlier this year, CHAI launched a national AI registry that will collect AI model cards, which contain information about how a given algorithm is trained and performs. Avanade, a joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture, is powering that registry with its Safe AI Governance Engine, which plans to one day vet individual health systems' AI.
SMALL BYTES
Despite persistent legal challenges and lobbying opposition, states are moving ahead with legislation to protect kids from online health harms. This week, Texas' Republican governor, Greg Abbott, signed a bill that will make Apple and Google's app stores responsible for ensuring kids get parental consent before downloading apps on their phones. The state legislature also passed a bill banning minors from creating social media accounts, though Abbott has yet to sign it.
Meanwhile, Nebraska's legislature has passed the Age-Appropriate Online Design Code Act, which would require social media companies to offer young users more tools to keep them safe on their platforms and limit the amount of data they can collect. It's among several states, including California and Maryland, to pass this type of legislation.
Social media state laws have faced significant legal challenges from NetChoice, a large tech industry lobbying group. And yet, states seem determined to pass laws that address mental health issues associated with these platforms.
