Ned Sharpless, the director of the National Cancer Institute, is stepping down at the end of April, he told STAT. Sharpless, 55, spent nearly five years leading the roughly $7 billion biomedical research agency, which is the largest of the 27 institutes that compose the National Institutes of Health. “I strongly support what this [administration] is doing to support cancer research, but it’s time for me to step aside,” he wrote in a text message. A former professor of medicine at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, Sharpless spent four years as director of UNC’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center....