In June 2009 the California Healthcare Institute and PricewaterhouseCoopers released a report, The National Institutes of Health: Fueling Healthcare Innovation in California, urging legislators to support increased funding for the National Institutes of Health.
The report called NIH “the backbone of the biomedical industry” in California, which employs more than 267,000 people in high wage jobs.
According to the report:
Without a sustained commitment of funding, scientists, academicians and leaders in the biomedical industry in California profiled in the report fear the biomedical ecosystem in California, made up of universities, research institutions and industry, will lose its capacity to produce the next generation of inventions to treat and cure disease.
Today’s medical advances in cancer, HIV/AIDS and cardiovascular and infectious diseases are the products of basic scientific research that took place decades ago, largely funded by governmental grants from NIH, said David Gollaher, Ph.D., California Healthcare Institute’s president and chief executive officer.
The U.S. has to make a commitment to provide sustained funding to NIH so that the next generation of innovations that will improve public health come to fruition, or we risk not only America’s competitiveness, but global health.
You can download the full report here.
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