Anthony Letai, MD, PhD, FAACR, Lays Out NCI’s Priorities at the AACR Annual Meeting 2026

May 6, 2026 by

At the AACR Annual Meeting 2026, held April 17-22, National Cancer Institute (NCI) Director Anthony Letai, MD, PhD, FAACR, posed this question to attendees: “Where can you focus your efforts to make the cancer research system stronger, faster, and more effective for people with cancer?”

Over the course of his address and fireside chat with AACR Immediate Past President Lillian L. Siu, MD, FAACR, and AACR President Keith T. Flaherty, MD, FAACR, he offered attendees insights into what NCI considers to be priorities and what areas he hopes researchers will consider as they work toward discovering the breakthroughs of the next quarter century.

Lillian L. Siu, MD, FAACR; Anthony Letai, MD, PhD, FAACR; and Keith T. Flaherty, MD, FAACR, during the NCI Director fireside chat at the AACR Annual Meeting 2026.

Early-phase Clinical Trials

The first priority he mentioned was improving the competitiveness of the United States when it comes to early-phase clinical trials.

“The United States is no longer the world’s only engine of biomedical innovation,” he said. “Other countries like China, Australia, New Zealand, and some in Europe are investing heavily and moving faster, particularly in early-stage clinical trials.”

NCI’s goal, Letai said, is to work with biotech and pharma, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), cancer centers, practitioners, researchers, and patient advocates to improve the speed and efficiency of the U.S. clinical trial apparatus.

When Siu, a clinical trialist herself, asked Letai to elaborate on ways the United States could achieve this, he pointed to the operation of clinical trials in Australia as one example. As he explained, they use a central contracting language embraced by both biotech and academic cancer centers that helps cut down on contracting time, which can be an “onerous and painful” process in the United States. Additionally, in some cases, local institutional review boards in Australia can approve first-in-human clinical trials without government intervention, which helps trials get started faster.

“While we cannot duplicate the Australian approach, we can get closer and imitate some of the things they’ve done that has made them faster,” Letai said.

He added that researchers can expect to see FDA introduce several initiatives over the next year to try to minimize processes and make trials move faster. One such initiative was announced by FDA about a week after the AACR Annual Meeting 2026: a pilot program for the implementation of real-time clinical trials that will launch this summer in which endpoints and data signals will be reported to the agency in real time.

Supporting Early-career Investigators

Another priority for NCI, Letai said, is early-career investigators. He assured attendees that while R01s for these researchers declined in FY25, NCI is planning to restore the number of early-career investigator awards to the same levels seen throughout the 2020s when there was an average of between 100 to 120 grants awarded to these investigators.

Additionally, Letai said NCI will continue to support young investigators through many different programs, including:

“If we want the next breakthrough, we must invest in the people who will discover it, and those are often early-stage investigators pursuing bold, new ideas,” Letai added.

Functional Precision Medicine

Anthony Letai, MD, PhD

Another area close to Letai’s heart as a cell biologist is functional precision medicine, where instead of inferring whether a drug will work based on genomics or models, researchers expose the drug to living tumor tissue and observe what happens. While this method was initially tested in the 1990s, Letai explained that its use failed to progress back then due to limited technologies. But thanks to improved single-cell analysis technologies and a greater number of cancer therapeutics that can be tested, Letai is excited for the future of this approach.

“Functional precision medicine lets us learn directly from the patient’s own biology in real time,” he said.

He challenged investigators to think about how their work touches on functional precision medicine as well as to explore exciting new technologies to advance this field further. He added that this approach also aligns with the goal of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to prioritize human-based research technologies and to rely less on animal-based models, and the NCI will hold a workshop on the topic in July.

Cancer Vaccines

Letai also expressed excitement over the progress being made in therapeutic cancer vaccines. He said NCI is working with the Foundation for the NIH on a public-private partnership to fund clinical trials that will explore vaccines for hard-to-treat cancers.

The plan for these trials was devised by the Cancer Vaccine National Plan Roadmap Advisory Committee, which is comprised of leading experts in this field from academia, industry, and nonprofits, including AACR. Earlier this year, the committee identified some of the emerging cancer vaccine technologies that may be ready to advance in clinical trials, and Letai said the goal is now to fund three different trials over the next three years to get go/no-go signals about which trials to move forward with.

“We’re going to stay out of the way of the trials that are already being performed by pharmaceutical firms,” Letai added. “We want to do something that wouldn’t otherwise be done.”

Addressing Cancer Disparities

When Flaherty asked about NCI’s ability to offer continued support for cancer disparities research, Letai responded: “I think you can look at our portfolio and see that we continue to fund cancer disparities research.” In fact, Letai said that one of his priorities is to address some of the geographical disparities seen with cancer prevention and early detection in the United States.

While great strides have been made through tobacco cessation programs and screening for lung, colorectal, cervical, breast, and prostate cancers that have helped decrease the number of deaths from cancer by 33% since 1991, Letai said that the benefits of these prevention and screening methods are not reaching everyone equally. To help address that, NCI is launching the Prevention, Screening, and Early Detection Initiative (PSEDI), which will bring evidence-based screening to underserved parts of the country starting with a pilot program in five states and select counties with particularly high cancer mortality rates.

He also challenged attendees to look for ways to expand access to their work.

“Think about who you’re not seeing in your work,” Letai said. “Who is not participating in this trial? Who is not showing up for screening appointments? Consider ways you can reach out to those people, because a breakthrough only matters if it reaches the people who need it.”

Communicating to the Public

One last priority mentioned by Letai is improving how NCI communicates with the public. He shared a new initiative called “Your NCI,” where they will explain how NCI grants have led to approved drugs for patients. During the Opening Ceremony, he played the first video to come out of this initiative, which told the story behind how a single NCI grant to James P. Allison, PhD, FAACR, led to the class of therapeutics now known as immune checkpoint inhibitors.

“I don’t think a lot of Americans understand what the National Cancer Institute does,” Letai said. “I want to make that message more clear … and let them know what they are getting for their money, because I think it’s a fabulous product and they get fabulous payoff from it.”