JOHN YANG: Earlier this month, doctors at the National Institutes of Health made a promising step in the fight against cancer in a paper published in Nature Medicine.

An immunotherapy treatment, which uses the body's own defenses, was able to shrink gastrointestinal tumors for about a quarter of patients.

But NIH staffing shortages, layoffs and cuts are threatening to delay the implementation of this promising development.

William Brangham recently spoke with Dr. Steve Rosenberg, who helped pioneer that treatment, about this precarious moment for federally funded science.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Dr. Rosenberg, so good to have you on the program.

Thank you for being here.

You have been working in this field of immunology for a very long period of time.

For people who have not been following cancer research as closely as you have, can you help us understand how significant a development was this?

DR. STEVEN ROSENBERG, National Cancer Institute: We've had three effective ways to treat cancer over the previous decades, surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.

And the best application of those treatments can cure over half of everyone who develops cancer now.

But the ability of cancer to spread to different sites still is a major problem.

And over 600,000Americans will die every year of cancer unless we develop better treatments.

And so rather than using scalpels, radiation beams and drugs, we're trying to take advantage of the body's own natural immune system that recognizes a cancer as foreign, but not foreign enough to reject it.

And our goal is to stimulate the immune system to be strong enough to get rid of the cancer.

And that approach is called immunotherapy.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: And so this technique showed promise in about a quarter of the tumors.

Who were the patients that were most benefiting from this?

What kinds of patients?

What were they suffering from?

STEVEN ROSENBERG: So we've developed immunotherapies over the years that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

We first did this in melanoma, where we could get good tumor regressions in, well over half in 56 percent of patients that had metastatic disease.

But that approach has not proven effective for patients with the common solid cancers that result in 90 percent of all deaths from cancer.

And by that I mean tumors from the rectum, the colon, the stomach, the pancreas, the uterus, the ovary.

And by developing techniques that we describe in this paper for the first time enabled us to consistently, or at least a quarter of the time, see regressions of metastatic cancer.

All the patients we treat here at the National Cancer Institute have been through all standard treatments and come here to the NIH, referred to as the national institutes of help for many patients as a last resort to receive new treatments and help us develop new approaches to patients with cancer that cannot be solved by today's medicine.

WILILAM BRANGHAM: I wonder, as someone who has been in this field of immunology, to have this kind of a.

Again, it's not this kind of progress to be made.

How does that feel to you personally as a researcher and a doctor?

STEVEN ROSENBERG: It's a roller coaster.

I'll walk into one room where we've treated patients.

I make rounds every day.

Well, we've treated patients that have had a good response and the patients are happy and their family is happy.

And I then walk into the next room and things have not worked.

And the patient and their family are in tears because in fact, this last hope has not helped them.

So it's a roller coaster of emotions what keeps all of us working day and night to try to develop better treatments.

The National Institutes of Health is the world's greatest research institution.

It has a 250 bed hospital in which we could treat patients.

It's surrounded by research laboratories.

My own laboratory is just yards away from our ward.

And it's in those research laboratories that these scientific findings are made and then translated into patients.

The mandate of the NIH is not only to provide the best of today's medicine, but to produce the medicine of.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Tomorrow to that roller coaster experience that you're describing.

As you well know, this is a very fraught time for federally funded science in this country, especially at the NIH.

Layoffs, budget cuts, et cetera.

What has that meant for your work specifically?

STEVEN ROSENBERG: Well, I've been doing this for many decades here at the NIH as the chief of the surgery branch.

These are the most difficult times that we have ever experienced.

We've had a hiring freeze which prevents us from hiring individuals.

Up until just last week, were not able to place orders for materials.

Now, that's been relaxed to some extent, but it's still quite limiting because the entire acquisitions department, the people who place the orders for the National Cancer Institute, have been terminated.

And so it's a difficult time.

And unfortunately, these problems have had us to delay patient treatments, but we are continuing to work.

But budget cuts are slowing down the research.

No question about that.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: And what does that, I'm curious, anecdotally, do, how is morale around the NIH right now?

STEVEN ROSENBERG: Well, we have a very dedicated group of people that are working here.

Many of our staff have been with me for over 10 years trying to help solve these problems.

These are difficult times because a lot of my fellow scientists are up for renewal and there's no guarantee that, in fact, they're going to be renewed as part of these budget cuts.

So there's a lot of anxiety right now about our ability to continuing to continue making progress at the pace that we wish.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: All right.

That is Dr. Steve Rosenberg at the National Cancer Institute at the NIH.

So good to speak with you.

Thank you very much for your time.

STEVEN ROSENBERG: My pleasure.