AUSTIN, Texas - Aiming to become a global leader in cancer research, Texas plans to invest $3 billion over the next decade in a bid to eradicate the disease, which kills more than a half-million Americans every year.
Gov. Rick Perry joined cancer survivor Lance Armstrong and about a dozen representatives of cancer research institutes at a luncheon Monday to discuss the effort, spawned by the death in September of former Gov. Ann Richards.
"The disease is just too devastating; it affects every single one of us," said Armstrong, who battled testicular cancer before winning the Tour de France seven consecutive years. "We need to make sure that sometime in our lives we put an end to it."
Texas is home to the Lance Armstrong Foundation and the Susan G. Komen breast cancer foundation, two of the nation's premier cancer-research groups.
The project will combine their efforts with research conducted by private companies, state universities, medical schools and the elite University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.
The fund will also draw high-tech companies and good-paying jobs to the state, Perry said.
"I can't think of anything that I think is more worthwhile, anything that will make Texas more the epicenter of an extraordinary focus worldwide in this effort," Perry said. "This is a powerful moment in Texas history."
The fund is the brainchild of Cathy Bonner, a longtime Austin insider and friend of Richards, a Democrat who died at age 73 of esophageal cancer. She said the fund will support multiyear projects in promising areas that aren't getting enough attention, such as the deadly spread of cancer cells to other parts of the body.
"What we're really talking about is something that can change the world," she said.
Two high-profile Republican state lawmakers have agreed to sponsor legislation creating the fund, but they have yet to determine how it would be structured and where the money would come from. One option would involve borrowing against bonds to produce $300 million a year for research.
Dr. John Mendelsohn, president of the Anderson Cancer Center, said the funding would accelerate research into preventing cancer, detecting it early and treating it in a less toxic way.
Eventually those findings probably could be applied to other diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease or schizophrenia, he said.
Cancer research has traditionally been funded by the federal government. The National Cancer Institute spent about $4.7 billion on research in the 2006 fiscal year in its own labs and through grants and agreements with universities, hospitals, research foundations and private businesses.
In recent years, however, a few states have moved toward more aggressively funding their own initiatives. In 2004, California voters approved a plan to spend about $300 million a year for the next decade on stem cell research.
