On Saturday, the Senate approved the fiscal year 2012 omnibus appropriations bill, which contained a $299 million increase in NIH funding.

Marc Casper, United for Medical Research spokesperson and the president & chief executive officer of Thermo Fisher Scientific, released the following statement in reaction to the bill’s passage:

“On behalf of the millions of patients, scientific researchers and industry leaders in the life sciences sector, we applaud the House and Senate’s passage of a $299 million increase in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget as part of the omnibus budget measure. By prioritizing our investment in the NIH, Congress is showcasing its commitment to our country’s health and economic well-being.

“NIH funding fuels the scientific discoveries that yield new treatments and cures, and leads to better quality of life for millions of patients and their families. The economic power of biomedical research is irrefutable as well, providing nearly a half million jobs nationwide and adding more than $69 billion in new economic activity in 2010 alone, according to a recent UMR report.

“Through a sustained strong investment in the life sciences, the U.S. will continue to significantly advance health care domestically and also maintain its global leadership by spearheading new fields of medical innovation.

“I commend Congress for their continued efforts and look forward to President Obama signing the bill into law.”

As the congressional supercommittee’s deadline approaches, a chorus of voices across the medical research community are speaking out, urging lawmakers to shield NIH from further cuts:

• On Sunday, Ohio University President Roderick McDavis wrote in The Athens News that “despite strong public support, funding from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and other historic funding sources is projected to decline. This trend must be reversed.”

• This past Monday, Tracy Jan at The Boston Globe wrote on the effects that research cuts would have on the Massachusetts economy. Susan Hockfield, president of MIT, explained that “reducing funding for research would be an enormous mistake. This is the kind of investment you have to make in good times and in bad.”

• The next day, The Columbus Dispatch featured Dr. John Barnard of Nationwide Children’s hopsital in an article on the erosion of biomedical research funding. He said that, “When funding is tight, and we can see the potential, it’s doubly frustrating that we can’t move forward. We can see the endgame here. For a lot of us, it’s tantalizingly close.”

• And today, the Post-Bulletin in Rochester, Minn. pointed to the Mayo Clinic’s efforts to prevent cuts at NIH. In the Mayo Clinic’s opinion “perspective,” Dr. Patricia Simmons wrote that “medical research should not be viewed as an expense to the Federal government, but rather it should be viewed as an investment in our nation’s health and economy.”

Today, the Boston Globe covered a new initiative out of the Harvard medical community that brings together disparate fields like computer science, physics, and biology to “build a quantitative understanding of how drugs work in the body and how to better design therapies.” They’re calling this new effort systems pharmacology.

Over the last two decades, the human genome project has yielded fantastic new discoveries in the world of fundamental biology, but translating these breakthroughs into new drugs has been much more difficult. By encouraging experts to look holistically at the systems interacting within the human body, systems pharmacology has the potential to advance new cures much quicker than we thought was possible. The project’s leader, Mark Kirschner, described it this way:

If you’re trying to halt traffic in a city, you could say you have this one major street and you could block the traffic on this major street. Maybe the traffic might not move as fast, but it would find a way. It might be you’d be better off picking three or five major thoroughfares and blocking them each 80 percent. But for you to make that prediction, you really first need a map.

NIH director, Dr. Francis Collins, had this to say about the new initiative:

Clearly, if we’re going to do translation based upon drugs we need to understand everything we can about how they interact with cells.

You can read the full article here.

As the battle over federal spending continues, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) writes an op-ed in The Hill – appropriately timed with today’s Senate Appropriations Committee markup that concluded with $190 million in proposed cuts to NIH - that presents a compelling case for why this funding is even more crucial during a gloomy economic climate.

DeLauro wrote:

We know that cutting medical research will cause job losses, even as we struggle with a full-blown jobs crisis. Every research grant awarded results in seven new jobs. And every single dollar of NIH funding is estimated to result in an additional two dollars of business activity and economic impact. This means that research has a nearly twofold return on our federal investment.

But beyond dollars and cents, there’s a human component as well. She continued:

The economic losses aside, I am the survivor of a disease that kills most women inside of five years. And the prospect of seeing grant applicants having to put their remarkable, lifesaving research on hold because we cut funding is unconscionable to me.

We at UMR applaud Rep. DeLauro’s staunch support for NIH, and we encourage every member of Congress to follow her lead.

This past Wednesday, Senator Bob Cardin (D-MD) spoke with NIH employees in Bethesda at a town-hall style meeting, where he addressed their concerns about the future of NIH funding and compensation for federal government workers:

“I am proud of the contribution our federal workforce makes to our nation, making sure that Americans are healthy, safe, and informed.  During these tough economic times, we all need to share in the sacrifices but federal employees have already given much. They did not create the federal deficits now plaguing the nation and they should not be asked to shoulder an unfair burden for reducing the deficit,” said Senator Cardin. “We need to deal with our debt; there is no question about that. But we need a credible, comprehensive plan that does not balance the budget just by cutting discretionary spending. So I am pleased that the recently enacted budget agreement provides some real protections against a further erosion of the compensation for federal workers.”

The full press release can be found here.

Senator Cardin is also one of UMR’s Profiles of Promise Leaders, a group of lawmakers we have chosen to highlight as true champions of the medical research cause. Check out the official Profiles of Promise website to learn more about these legislators and their valiant support for NIH funding.

Researchers at NIH are focused on solving our country’s most pressing health care challenges, like Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, and cancer. But there’s also a group of dedicated professionals working to cure diseases we haven’t even discovered. Meet Dr. William Gahl, clinical director of NIH’s Undiagnosed Diseases Program.

Today, the Washington Post profiled Dr. Gahl, giving us a unique window into his world:

The program is designed to go beyond the organ-centered focus of most medical specialties, to get a more holistic view. Gahl and his 30-member staff bring together scientists from all over the NIH, the country’s top medical research institute. Every patient is seen for free, a luxury of the government that is rare in private research settings. Insurance and drug companies “don’t have a focus that’s uninfluenced by profit” when it comes to diseases that afflict just 200,000 patients a year, Gahl said.

You can find the full article here, and learn more about the Undiagnosed Diseases Program here.

Image: Amanda Voisard/THE WASHINGTON POST

This week, Bloomberg’s Elizabeth Lopatto examines how the recent debt ceiling agreement will impact NIH funding:

If Congress doesn’t approve $1.5 trillion in savings by Christmas, a broad swath of federal programs will be automatically slashed, including the National Institutes of Health…

A 7.9 percent cut for NIH would be the largest in the agency’s history, amounting to about a $2.5 billion reduction in 2013. By comparison, the agency was cut $317 million this year.

There may be some light at the end of the tunnel, however. Lopatto continues:

[T]he NIH could draw on the bipartisan support it long has enjoyed in Congress. A largely Republican- controlled Congress about doubled the agency’s budget from 1998 to 2003.

The threat of deep cuts to medical research may help lawmakers forge an agreement that avoids the automatic reduction, said former Representative James Walsh, a New York Republican.

“We all had constituents who have cancer and heart disease and childhood diabetes — and they are very effective advocates,” he said.

A new report from Science Progress finds that the state of research funding in the United States leaves much to be desired:

[F]unding for NIH has experienced little fiscal growth over the last eight years, in spite of the American public’s strong support of biomedical research. The lack of a coherent government strategy for evaluating the impact of federal programs and setting R&D funding priorities across the federal government, combined with sometimes dramatic “feast to famine” swings in funding, particularly for NIH, should raise the question of whether the American people are getting their money’s worth from federally funded R&D. Many programs and projects start and stop—sometimes abruptly—with the availability of government-funded grants. Such inconsistencies waste money and interrupt careers.

Also from the report, which you can download here, a chart showing that the US lags behind Israel, Sweden, Japan, and South Korea in terms of R&D funding as a percentage of GDP:

At the BIO International Convention last week, NIH Director Francis Collins spoke with Bloomberg TV about the importance of robust funding for medical research, as well as the ways in which NIH is streamlining the development process for new treatments.

Also from the BIO Convention, a new survey showing that “over three-quarters of voters (76%) are supportive of a continued commitment to federal spending on biotech research.” The full study can be found here [PDF] and the accompanying release here.

In 1887, the U.S. Government established the Hygenic Laboratory in Staten Island as a national center devoted to researching the spread and treatment of infectious disease. This lab was staffed by one man: 27-year-old Joseph Kinyoun, who would eventually become the first director of NIH. The Atlantic deemed this the photo of the day today and just last month The Scientist’s Cristina Luiggi wrote:

“Joseph James Kinyoun, belonged to a new generation of scientists and physicians who were beginning to understand how microscopic organisms underlay the terrible killers of their day, such as smallpox, yellow fever, and Asiatic cholera. That one-room lab on Staten Island, which Kinyoun originally called “the Laboratory of Hygiene,” ultimately evolved into the 27 institutes and centers that now make up the National Institutes of Health.

[...]

Kinyoun’s tenure as the first director of the NIH lasted 12 years, but his role in shaping how the federal government dealt with the country’s health continued well after his retirement. Following several deaths due to contaminated and shoddily produced vaccines, he pushed hard for the implementation of universal standards for the production of medicines.”

124 years later it’s important to not only remember where we came from, but to also reflect on the direction in which we are headed. With ample resources, NIH will undoubtedly continue to unlock the next generation of cutting-edge science.

To see the full article in The Scientist, visit their web site.

Image: National Cancer Institute. Via The Scientist.